Anybody who wants to join the The River can pay twenty dollars a month, and anybody who wanted to become a voting member can pay an additional hundred dollars a year. Members elect the board of directors, the directors hire and fire the staff. We adopted bylaws that give the members the power to call an emergency meeting online, if enough members agree the situation warrants the measure. And we started creating the seeds of community by starting conversations about everything from technology to the arts, sports to politics to ufos. And among the conversations have been heated ones about how to run the place.
Democracy is a process.
It is often frustrating, always raucous and argumentative and heated, requiring many people to have public conversations with many other people. It's a skill that Americans learned in kindergarten, and which we practice in many aspects of our lives. For a couple hundred members of a virtual community to pick up stakes, join resources in a cooperative venture, and set out for new territory is a very American phenomenon. As the people in the former Communist bloc countries are now learning, democracy isn't just a matter of honest elections. There is an invisible superstructure of conversation, involving skills honed in classroom debates and barroom arguments, that gives free citizens the individual and collective intelligence necessary to govern ourselves.