This is the page where my family, former students, friends, and other completely disinterested people keep track of me. No, I don't have a facebook page or a blog. Just keeping up with my email is enough. What am I doing?

My coauthor and I finished We the People: Consenting to a Deeper Democracy, A Guide to Sociocratic Principles and Methods in 2007 (see Sociocracy below). Five years is a long time to be writing a book -- there were days when I despaired. Since then, I've been running the press, Sociocracy.info, and he is running his consulting firm, Governance Alive . The current project related to sociocracy is starting the Center for Sociocratic Governance. The focus of the Center will be educational programs and publications.

And it is time to revise We the People. And to learn how to design professional looking web-sites -- good luck on that one! It's hard. The technical back end is not so firm as it is cracked up to be. It behaves differently on every browser -- and when it storms.

In America, "sociocracy" is an unwelcome and tongue twisting word. Subconsiously and often consciously, it reminds people of "socialism." And it is hard to say in English. A reader just returned from Europe and returned to say, it's a much nicer word in any other language but this one. In English, somewhere in the middle the tongue gets lost.

In other parts of the world, since it poses no problems, it hangs on. We've tried other names including "dynamic governance," "dynamic self-governance," and as in our title, a "deeper democracy." None have surfaced as clear favorites although the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) , a rapidly growing national organization of 15,000 organizations, uses "dynamic governance" in chapters across the country and the Center for Non-Violent Communication uses "sociocracy."

Sociocracy

We the People is about a new governance method based on systems thinking. Although the idea of governance by the "socius," the associates, began with Comte and was further developed by Lester Frank Ward and Kees Boeke, the first method that could be applied in a large organization was developed by Gerard Endenburg in The Netherlands.

Endenburg studied cybernetics in the 1950s. When he assumed management of his parents' electrical engineering company, he began to apply its principles to people management in the same way he had applied it in engineering electronics. Cybernetics, the science of steering and control, is now part of the larger field that first became chaos theory, then complexity theory. Systems thinking is now the umbrella term. Feedback and feed-forward loops are basic to the organizational principles and methods in sociocratic organizations.

Sociocratic organizations use consensus as a decision-making method because it produces deeper commitment and more consistent follow through. Before Endenburg's system, no one using consensus decision-making had been able to figure out how to use it in a large organization, or in a production-dependent environment like corporations. While many corporations and other organizations use consensus decision-making in strategy sessions for top management, that is as far as it gets.

Organizations using the method include national corporations, performing arts groups, professional organizations, international associations, cohousing communities, nursing homes ...

We the People is available from Amazon as well as from the Sociocracy.info site. Please buy it at Amazon by clicking on the link to the right unless you have a thing against them. Buying from them will focus the numbers and move us up on their bestseller list.

Orientation to College: A Reader on Becoming Educated

Orientaton to College just keeps rolling along. I probably won't do a revision. Everytime I get a royalty statement, it's from a different publisher so I have no idea which editor I'm assigned to. The bigger issue is that this small book of readings is now being sold on Amazon for $77+. I think that is outrageous. The book is now 7 years old -- they put a copyright of 2003 on it but it was finished in 2002. $250 pages? Ridiculous price for a textbook with no photographs and few graphs. No fancy layout. Contains no disk. No stickers even!

It is a wonderful, wonderful book. It just shouldn't cost $77 to parents are already in shock from paying tuition.

The next book of this type will be a mass market paperback for parents, high school seniors, and college freshmen. It will still talk about how important the liberal arts are but it will also talk about the reasons to go to college and the reasons not to go to college. Too many families are bankrupting themselves to send children to college who have no business being there and the colleges know it. (You can see I'm on a rant about this.) For many HS grads, the time to go to college has not yet come.

Enough for now. Let me hear from you if I haven't seen you in a while and enjoy the rest of the day,

Sharon.

GreenAmigos