When our common cause was fear for the future of the WELL, a group of admittedly idiosyncratically individualists who normally wouldn't agree on the time of day put aside our differences and accomplished an enormous amount of decision-making and effective action in a short amount of time. When it took the elected Implementation Committee a few more months to get set up to open, however, the temporary moratorium on intramural bickering dissolved rapidly. We fell to arguing in most vicious terms. But we held the election, and the newly elected Board of Directors is authorized to complete the process of turning our alpha-test into a real business. 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.