I'm learning, through experience, that 'decisions made together' are sounder than 'decisions made alone.' I'm also learning that the emerging social techniques allowing us to do this well, have evolved markedly in very recent years.

As it happens, Eugene is home to some of the key personalities who are exploring the immense challenges and opportunities gifted by this work, on the national and international stage. A remarkable skillset to draw upon.

As the Eugene Permaculture Guild steering committee consciously explores our evolving approach to decision-making (we work very well together even as stepping into deeper levels of coherence and complexity always demands the struggle of change) we are wrestling with what it is to be human.

Here's a 45 minute.mp3 recording of the report I made (on behalf of an advisory 'sub-committee', now known as 'the process art workgroup') to the steering committee in May 2006, positing a step toward refining our already-gentle approach. Feedback was proffered by those in attendance.

The dialog provides a delightfully self-referential example of how collective wisdom, in this instance about 'collective wisdom-making' itself, can prove revelatory. Our sharing concluded with the laughter-inducing: "Have we reached consensus on consensus, then?"

Our next meeting, slated for early October 2006, will involve the 'training' we agreed then, to schedule in the wake of our recent Bioregional Pemaculture Gathering.

In the presentation I mention two local co-intelligence teachers. Tree Bresson is one of the country's foremost teacher/learners of consensus technes - with a strong focus on working with non-profit communities. She makes a living at it. And Tom Atlee of the Co-Intelligence Insitute surfs the very forefront of international efforts to research, network, advocate, and help organize leading-edge experiments and conversations in new, wiser forms of civilization. Their websites are motherlodes of gnosis.