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.

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. Somewhere in the middle, the tongue gets lost. In other parts of the world, it poses no problems so 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 across the country.

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, and now is systems thinking. Feedback and feed-forward loops underly all 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 structure a large organization using it. While many corporations and other organizations use consensus making in strategy sessions form top management, that is as far as it gets.

Decison-making in sociocratic organizations is both hierarchical and consensual. 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.

(Amazon will say it takes 3 weeks or so to obtain but this is not true. Never mind the details of why they say that.)

Education & School Governance

After completing We the People, I began thinking about education and how this governance method would solve the problem of educational organizations in which teachers are both the most important employees and the most powerless. Schools are ruled autocratically by school boards, state governments, and management. Teachers have no power unless they go outside their schools and join a union.

Sociocratic governance would allow teachers to control their professional lives by integrating the needs of those who fund the schools along with the management, teachers, students, and parents. None of these groups could be ignored and all would have appropriate control over their participation and responsibilities.

By accident, before my education book started wafting up from my keyboard, I met a young man who was obsessed with systems thinking. With no experience and no resources, he wanted to start a school. He had been in town for two weeks. He had read my website and the essays posted at Sociocracy.info. He thought I might help.

A sucker for an impossible project, I signed on. Thus Wunderkinder Charter School was conceived, although it certainly isn't off the ground yet.

That's a long way around to saying that I think the best name will develop out of systems thinking, where the development of Endenburg's principles and methods of sociocratic organization started.

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. No disk. No sticker, 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.