We carefully (maintaining social distance, etc.) gathered the signatures needed for the incorporation forms. Sent them all off, with an explanation of how we expected to ensure democratic control (Consensus Decision Making – CDM – and a little Sociocracy). We thought that noting these in our Standing Orders would be sufficient, and that we wouldn’t need to formally incorporate them into our Rules.
However, the Financial Conduct Authority felt that this would not be sufficient. So we spent a bit of time discussing this, and changing the Rules accordingly:
- We explicitly changed the text in a few places to require a consensus as opposed to traditional voting;
- There are a few places where traditional voting does make most sense – e.g. for adding, removing committee members, etc. (though we changed the Rules to use Single Transferable Voting for voting for new committee members).
- We decided to leave the word “vote” in the text of the rest of the Rules, because it is a concise way to say “give one’s final opinion on a matter, after hearing everyone and taking all views into account”.
We also wrote the threshold for people blocking consensii into the Rules.
Work continued on the business plan, fleshing out the risk register with reference to the project plan. And work started on the financial projections, also based on the project plan.
We had our usual social meetings over Zoom.
And we attended a couple of seminars over Zoom, the most useful of which was one on finding a site, organised by the good people at wMUCH (West Midlands Urban Community Housing).
Cohousing West Midlands 