Agreements

Context

The types of agreements we make are up to us.

While there are contexts where organising practices can benefit from being dynamic and/or undocumented, we also need durable groups that streamline horizontal decision-making by establishing a clear standards for relating to each other, and clarifying the conditions within which these standards be challenged, revised, or even disposed of all together.

Potential aspects of our collective practices we could form agreements around include:

• Values and Principles: agreements about what values and principles we take for granted and which we want to keep in mind to help direct our project.
• Decision-making: agreements about the processes we use for making specific types of decisions in different ways
• Participation: agreements around our entry & exit pathways, our conduct towards each others, and our responsibilities and expectations within the collective.
• Operational processes: agreements about how we manage money, what technologies we choose to use.

Agreement Proposals

We are currently in the process of articulating the first version of our more detailed ‘Participation Agreements’:

• Supporter Roles Agreement, which aims to set-up a clear support structure that our other agreements can reference to help us learn to collectively take responsibility for navigating conflict well together.
• Conduct Agreement, which aims to articulate our shared values around how we conduct ourselves in relation to each other, and how we intend to respond in situations where a participant’s conduct does not align with our collective expectations.
• Responsibilities & Expectations Agreement, which is intended to clarify what responsibilities we each agree to by participating in this collective in different ways, and what we can expect from the collective as participants.
• Entry & Exit Pathways Agreement, which outlines our processes for inviting additional participants to collaborate with us on this experiment in implementing RAD housing and co-creating our collective living practices going forward and under what conditions people might stop participating.

For those who are not currently able to participate in the Brassica Collective, yet want to stay informed for future participation possibilities and/or ad-hoc contributions to the project (such as attending working-bees), we encourage maintaining a ‘supporter’ role.

Register of Agreements

As we make agreements as a collective, they will be added here. We currently have an interim process for making decisions about our initial agreements. This will be replaced with the decision-making agreements we co-create.