Moonlight Grove Philosophy

This is a set of webpages describing both the philosophy of Moonlight Grove and it's physical structure, as I believe the two cannot be separated. The author of a comment is indicated by the initials under it; if you disagree, or want to say something about any of it, please send mail to erinp@mit.edu.:)

Name

What should this place be called?

Moonlight Grove

or Moonlight Grove in Spanish(emp)

People:

What are people's responsibilities? Who can join? Is it possible to "reserve a space"? How many people are we planning for? Do we need a voting system of some sort? An officer system? What are guest privileges? Can we kick people out? Do we want more restrictive (ET-like) or less restrictive (assume everyone will be responsible by themselves)? What happens when someone leaves? (MCS)

Do we want to make provisions for things falling apart and just not working?

(MCS)

This would be economically prudent -- i.e., the members of the community would suffer smaller financial losses if things were planned with this possiblity in mind.

Do we want to make these sorts of failure plans? On one hand, it's the prudent thing to do. You don't go to sea in a big ship without lifeboats. On the other hand, it seems there's a certain amount of defeatistism in making such plans; people may be less inclined to struggle to make the community *work*, to fix whatever problems may arise, if they know it won't be the end of everyone's world if the community fails. Then again, this attitude might result in the net psychological effect of trapping the community-members into the community with the threat of social and financial ruin, which would be psychologically damaging as well. This should probably be considered. I don't know what the right answer is. It would be brave and heroic to lock ourselves into this, but perhaps foolish as well.(ejpm)(2/29/96)

Thoughts

I think that, in order to thrive, any such community must be designed to allow for change, flexibility, and diversity amongst the participants.. people change, their interests change, etc., over time. (Bill Sommerfeld)

I agree with this wholeheartedly. A lack of ability to change is probably the single thing that would cause MG to fall apart. On the other hand, I think there needs to be some significant structure that will hold the group together. Forcing one person, or a small group, to hold the responsibility for managing the flexibility will either exhaust the people or degenerate into an issue of personality.(emp)

Organization

Ok. That was all I had written down, for the moment. Hmm. I think we should think about planning the planning. Some sort of division of labor - someone needs to look into how to start a corporation of the kind we want, we need to investigate costs of construction, farming methods, we'll want to look at previous commune attempts and see what worked and what didn't (not that we are making a commune, but there are similarities), etc.(MCS)

I think that before we do that, we need to do a bit more brainstorming about what exactly we want. The issues we need to look into will come out of this brainstorming. Whenever a person sees something that needs some research, they can do the research and bring the results back, and we can post them here. Perhaps people could drop me a note when they begin research so that we won't have unnecessary duplication, though two views on the same subject are always useful...eventually, I think we are going to have to start dividing things up, but I don't think that's quite yet. (emp)