Anyway, here are a few of the ideas i scribbled after the meeting
- sovereignty should rest at many levels, but primary sovereignty should rest at whatever level allows optimum balance between individual sovereignty and community involvement.
- this optimum level will be the level at which consensus decision making works best.
- consensus might work among 10,000 people of similar mind, but not among 10 people who fundamentally disagree so the size of a local community depends on the people in it.
- this might tend communities to move towards ghettoisation – people living only with ‘people like them’, however, shared larger scale institutions and networks (especially online networks), interdependence of communities and a constant flow of people between communities to another should be. I also believe that the differences between people in our current society will fade when people are free and able to express their power.
- we should think about structures and arrangements that might help these communities to thrive, but NOT prescribe a blueprint of how we believe these should look – the only people who can do this are the members of each community themselves.
- we should focus on practical, small scale, bottom-up steps that communities can take to move towards local sovereignty.
- these steps fall into 2 categories a) taking power from institutions that already have power (council, government, corporations, landowners) b) making new power (communities setting up and running schemes themselves)
- we should actually DO these things – people interested should come together in a community and start working on it.
