Plenary meeting 15 June 2025

Hi @mieke,

Thanks a lot for your message. The nuance and the inclusion of possible ways forward reassure me that it’s going to be fine to find a solution to this.

(my inner governance nerd is secretly also a bit exciting that we get to test out our process for an absentee who doesn’t agree with the decisions taken at the last meeting :smiling_face:)

Below you can find a structured message with a proposal on the way forward. Happy to hear how that lands with you.

1. Parenthesis on governance

Just for everybody’s clarity (so addressed at everybody), given that we are trying this out for the first time, here’s a couple of clarifications on objections and disagreeing with decisions taken.

  • Objecting in absence is not possible in sociocracy. The reason is that we make decisions based on collective intelligence, which means listening to each others’ arguments before coming to a conclusion. So if you are not present in the meeting, it’s not possible to just object.

  • When someone who was absent during a meeting doesn’t agree with a decision that was taken, our governance document says they have 48 hours to ask the group to re-schedule the proposal for the next plenary.

  • An objection is defined as “a reasoned statement of what can go wrong when the decision is approved”, with “going wrong” defined as “harming the purpose of the group” (see facilitation training slide deck, slide 10, Login – Nextcloud)

2. The decision on sustainable insulation

During the rounds with comments and concerns, several people (including myself and @alberto) commented that sustainable insulation seems like a great thing to have, but probably also a nice-to-have, and a bit at odds with our attempts to cut costs wherever we can.

Therefore what I suggest is that we re-schedule the topic for next meeting, and go through another comments round rather fast and discuss together what we want to do with this proposal, and how we can hold all people’s needs in the best possible way. Would that work for you @mieke?

3. Garden paths

On the garden paths I am a bit less clear on the way forward. What I understand from your message is that you are ok with having a budget for garden paths, but that you would like to do more research, because you really want to make sure that it can’t be done for a lower budget. Did I get that right?

If that’s the case, then a first step I’m proposing is to move the rest of the discussion to the thread that we already have on this topic (Budgeting for a contractor to install the garden paths), and continue the exchange over there, so that we keep all the information in one place.

Ultimately of course, we’ll work towards re-scheduling the topic for the plenary of 25 June. It’s just that I prefer to have all the information in one place.

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