As oil continued to pour into the Gulf of Mexico on a recent Saturday, Jennifer Wilkerson spent three hours on the phone talking about life after petroleum.

The Parking Lot is for ideas we've brought up but been unable to agree upon. They need more discussion.

10 April 2009
1. DECISION LOG: We will have a formal process for making and documenting decisions.
2. DECISION LOG: we will use consensus as our decision-making method.
3. DECISION LOG: we will establish a twice a month schedule for regular meetings and schedule additional meetings as needed for working on specific goals.

13 June 2009
4. Process Decisions:
a. thumbs up visual quick vote
b. “Wordsmithing” is a shorthand request to stop the current discussion because it’s wordsmithing rather than the conceptual work at hand.

Intentional Communities Website: provides information on the intentional communities movement including a searchable Communities Directory and hundreds of articles on community. Published by the FIC

Vauban hopes to forge a model community without that great staple of modern life – the car. Now the sound of birdsong has replaced the roar of traffic and children can play in the street

By Tony Paterson

Friday, 26 June 2009

The Germans may have given the world the Audi and the autobahn, but they have banished everything with four wheels and an engine from the streets of Vauban – a model brave new world of a community in the country's south-west, next to the borders with Switzerland and France.

In Vauban, a suburb of the university town of Freiburg, luxuriant beds of brilliant flowers replace what would normally be parking outside its neat, middle- class homes. Instead of the roar of traffic, the residents listen to birdsong, children playing and the occasional jingle of a bicycle bell.

"If you want to have a car here, you have to pay about €20,000 for a space in one of our garages on the outskirts of the district," says Andreas Delleske one of the founders and now a promoter of the Vauban project, "but about 57 per cent of the residents sold a car to enjoy the privilege of living here." As a result, most residents travel by bike or use the ultra-efficient tram service that connects the suburb with the centre of Freiburg, 15 minutes away. If they want a car to go on holiday or to shift things, they hire one or join one of the town's car-sharing schemes.

Read the complete article

Who Will Control It: the Corporations or the Public?

By ERNEST CALLENBACH and HARVEY WASSERMAN

This free-ranging conversation between Ernest Callenbach, author of the legendary Ecotopia (1974), and Harvey Wasserman, author of SOLARTOPIA! Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030 (2007), about our green-powered future was filmed by EON and can be viewed here. The transcript can be read here.

Fellow aspiring communitarians,

As promised, attached is a Word doc containing all of the survey questions (43!), including the modifications and additions we discussed at the last meeting (at least to the extent that my notes and memory could reconstruct). The homework goal is to arrive at an understanding of where the 7 or 8 of us stand in relation to these issues so that we can evaluate our ability to form a core organizing group. Between now and the next meeting, we hope to take two steps towards the goal:

1. Identifying the questions the core group should answer:

The Center for Community Alternatives is the official sponsor of the Triangle Intentional Communities Meetup Group, an incubator for intentional community. Now...just what is an intentional community?

This is a follow up to our November Meetup where we are fully engaged in the visioning process. We are working on creating a sophisticated questionaire which will allow us to self-select ourselves into one or more intentional community core groups. These core groups will then develop further towards their common goals and objectives, hopefully culminating into realized intentional communities be they urban or agrarian, income sharing or not, etc. Background.

Date: Saturday, December 6th

Time: 2 - 5pm

Location: A private residence in Durham. Please contact us for the address and directions.