The Residents’ Assembly Service: its vision and evolution

The Residents’ Assembly Service (RAS) facilitates the decision-making process of the Residents’ Assembly (RA). The current team is the third since it was set up. Over the years, the vision and the role of the RAS have changed as new teams replaced older ones. Here, former RAS member Rakhal and current members Inge and Slava share some of the RAS’ history, its present role and their plans for the future.

The history of the RAS

The RAS, says Rakhal, was created around 2004 and its role, at first, was rather limited. It was to organize the decision-making process of the RA, count votes and announce the outcome. Over the years, the group also got involved in the facilitation of meetings.

The second team, in which Rakhal participated, evolved the role of the RAS by attempting to organize new ways of meeting. One of their experiments was called ‘the RA gathering’, an event during which people were not only sharing, but also eating and playing games together. “It brought a new sense of meetings, but it didn’t last,” says Rakhal.

The current team is now further evolving the role of the RAS. The members, Inge, Jesse and Slava, are supported by Hedia and Isha. But more people will be needed, says Slava. “The RAS should be strengthened. We need additional resources, more skills, and more brains.” Also, a new mandate is being prepared which will soon be presented to the community.

“It is very hard for a large number of people, such as the Residents’ Assembly, to agree on decisions. People are often not well-informed; they sometimes have opinions about things they do not know about. Here the RAS has a role to play,” says Rakhal. “There is a tremendous amount of knowledge in the community and the RAS encourages the sharing of this knowledge. What’s blocking is a lack of trust,” says Inge.

All acknowledge that participating in the Residents’ Assembly is a learning process. “The RAS has an important role in this learning as it facilitates the decision-making process. The RAS can encourage learning or hinder it,” says Rakhal.

What changed with the new team

One of the very important steps for the RAS, according to Slava, was the Retreat, which the RAS helped to organize. “The Retreat notably improved the relationship between the RAS and the residents as the latter got the feeling that they could rely on the RAS as they felt listened to.” After Inge joined, the RAS started improving the way meetings were facilitated and began using online tools to get the views of the community. “What we have achieved is that discussion now starts online. The RAS is also facilitating small preparatory meetings between parties so everyone feels heard and respected. When people get to a general meeting, it is no longer a confrontation on the emotional level and the issue itself can more easily be resolved”, says Inge.

In addition to improving the atmosphere of General Meetings, Slava and Inge also try to improve community participation, both in terms of quality and quantity. Inge emphasizes the importance of ‘homework’. For her, residents can only discuss topics meaningfully if they have information about them. That is the reason why Slava and Inge started to prepare meetings in advance, posting relevant information on a specially created website. “Making information and feedback public,” says Inge, “promotes transparency”. She feels it has opened up a lot of trust in the community. Also, thanks to these online tools, the RAS got a better sense of how many people were participating because numbers were easier to get (for example how many people read the website). “People can now participate according to their own possibilities and willingness,” says Rakhal. “The decision-making process has become more like the reflection of a collective intelligence, because it comes from several different perspectives and thus leads to richer and more durable decisions.”

The future of the RAS

The RAS’ work of supporting the RA, says Inge, “is just beginning” with the RAS itself now enjoying support of the community, including financially. Ideally, says Inge, the RAS team should consist of five full-time people. “I foresee that in the next two years there will be an increase in the amount of work of the RAS and then I expect it to diminish gradually. The job of the present RAS is to get through the blockage of lack of trust and transparency. When this blockage is gone, the RAS will not be needed any more because information will flow freely. By then, only a secretariat will be required as there will no longer be any need to have to do what the RAS is doing now, which is collecting information and doing research on the ground.”

Slava explains that the RAS would like to start a proper online platform called the ‘Community Collaboration Space’ which would be complementary to the existing Auronet. “Through this platform, Aurovilians could opt to only receive the information they are interested in, give feedback on any topic of their choice and channel this feedback to the working groups concerned.” The project is still in the early design phase.

In brief, says Inge, “the role of the RAS is to help realize Mother’s Dream by supporting the RA in becoming a collective manifestation of Aurovilians’ inner growth.”