Knitting the community together

“WE NEED YOU TO NOMINATE NEW MEMBERS,” thunders the email message from the RAS, Auroville’s Residents’ Assembly Service. “IT’S WORKING GROUP NOMINATIONS TIME”. The community is urged to nominate new members for the Town Development Council [see the June-July issue of Auroville Today # 335-336] and replacements for outgoing members of the Working Committee (3), the Auroville Council (3) and the Funds and Assets Management Committee (2). Each resident is invited to click a button and propose names.

This email is but one of the many personalised messages each Aurovilian receives from the RAS every week. For some, it’s an overkill. But not for the RAS which takes its motto “If you want to go fast – go alone, if you want to go far – go together” seriously. It showers the community with emails such as the newsletter ‘Vibe’, containing the most interesting news items of the week; reports of working groups; requests for views on proposals, policies and mandates; requests to nominate new members of working groups; invitations to meetings and CAT (Create Auroville Together) sessions; reminders that people have to respond to earlier emails; and most recently, a request “to immediately act to reduce water consumption in response to Tamil Nadu’s current exceptional drought”.

The evolution of the RAS

These messages show the evolution of the RAS. It started as an electoral commission with a very limited mandate, that of overseeing the decision-making in the Residents’ Assembly and counting the votes. It evolved to become Auroville’s major communication body.

“This is in accordance with the decision-making policy of the Residents’ Assembly,” explains Jesse, who together with Isha, Slava and Tatiana runs the RAS. “The policy says that Auroville wishes to arrive at decisions by consensus, but if that fails, we go for voting. But the policy has neither a definition of consensus nor an indication how that consensus has to be achieved. It’s therefore skewed in favour of voting. We had to figure out how that elusive consensus could be reached.”

Auroville favours collaborative decision-making. Top-down decision-making is hardly existent; if it happens, it usually meets with resistance. “The RAS have learned that you can’t separate the community from decision-making and that decision-making is a collaborative process,” says Jesse. “We wondered why there was such difficulty in reaching consensus as we all share the same collective values – the Charter, the Dream, the City the Earth needs etc. We found that differences of opinion, most of the time, are due to poor communication. So we set out to improve it.”

The communication drive led to a change of attitude. Working closely with the working groups and the News and Notes team, the RAS started taking charge of the publication of each proposal that required collective approval in English, Tamil and French. They invite feedback, then incorporate the feedback as much as possible, publish the revised proposal, and continue doing that as long as is required. “We seek to maintain a high standard and quality of communication,” says Jesse. “If a proposal is well-configured, the working group has a better chance of achieving its objective. Badly-worded documents can destroy the work of the group and even insult people. Carefully worded documents can be valuable steps towards harmony.” He observes that usually, at the end of the feedback process, the proposal has so dramatically improved that it is likely to be accepted without problem. “The process is intended to diminish the emphasis and importance of voting within our decision-making systems.”

Communication is also a must for the filling of vacancies in working groups. In accordance with the community approved “Participatory Working Groups system”, the RAS first invites all residents to nominate potential working group members and others who wish to participate in the selection process but who do not themselves want to join a working group. The names of those nominated are then published for feedback and the feedback received is checked by a separate group which announces who are eligible. Those qualified then mandatorily attend a three-day selection process, where the decision is taken about who will become the new members of the working groups. The process is flexible: each participant in the three-day selection process can at any point step forward to become nominated as a working group member – even those who had initially stated they did not want to join a working group.

Increasing Aurovilians’ participation

Contrary to an autocratic system where participation is not encouraged and people are just expected to do as the boss tells them, in Auroville people are expected to participate. “Aurovilians have a responsibility to be aware of what’s going on and the consequences a decision will have for Auroville and for themselves,” says Jesse. He acknowledges that this is a tall demand. People are sometimes asked to read through pages of legalistic texts, such as in the case of approving new mandates and policies, and often give up after the first page.

The RAS tries to meet the difficulty by feeding the Aurovilians with bite-sized and easily digestible chunks. Long policies are broken up into sections and people are invited to comment after each part. ‘Legal’ sections, sometimes termed ‘the boring bits’, can be skipped. The comments on the more interesting sections are then collated by the RAS and sent to the author of the document to gauge the mood of the community and make appropriate changes.

Yet, and notwithstanding all these efforts, community participation in collective decision-making remains limited. Voting attracts a maximum of 400 people out of 1800 registered residents. The Open Forum of the Auronet, Auroville’s Intranet portal which aims at facilitating the exchange of information among Aurovilians and friends of Auroville, is only actively used by a small group of people. The attempt to create an Active Residents’ Assembly [see AVToday # 326, September 2016] seems to have become dormant. Does all this show that only a small group of people is truly interested in general Auroville affairs and that the majority has a Not In My Back Yard attitude and does not care?

Jesse reflects. “Of course, some people are only interested if a topic touches their private lives. A certain number of people are always present in general meetings, but there is a shifting participation of people who only attend when a topic interests them. For example, if the issue is about land you get a different participation than if the issue is about entry or planning or food. So the general interest is not limited to 300 people; rather you should say that on any given topic, about 300 people will be interested. And that level of participation is quite normal.”

The RAS can most certainly get more people to participate, says Jesse. But then funds will need to be released for improving the online tools for community engagement, for translating important issues in other languages, and to purchase equipment for providing simultaneous interpretation services during meetings. “Obviously, anyone not fluent in English will have difficulty participating in meetings conducted in English. It’s fair to assume that at present, Auroville is missing a great deal of what these people could contribute to the community.”

Community change

“A few years ago I used to hear much criticism and bad language about the working groups and its members,” says Jesse. “They were seen as ‘outsiders’, living in an ivory tower, not as fellow Aurovilians who try to do a particular job. But I don’t hear that so much anymore. There’s a level of harmony and interconnectedness of all working groups that wasn’t there five years ago. Also, the atmosphere in meetings has changed. Years ago, I would dread going to meetings where people would shout, accuse others and start a blame game. Today, these meetings are well-structured; they have a dedication at the beginning and at the end, are well-guided and people are respectful towards one another, even if their views differ. The experience of today is calm and positive and the atmosphere in the room is constructive and forward-moving without the sense of accusation. That’s a huge improvement. An increased harmony and working together is finally manifesting.”

Doubtless, a lot of the credit goes to the RAS.