Synpaedia | Main / Singles Meeting

Overview

Quarterly consensus process among people who want single rooms and any others who wish to participate, facilitated by the RA. It is important that there are some impartial participants who aren't vying for a single, who serve as sources of insight or mediation. The information shared in Singles Meeting is confidential. Usually strong recommendations are made in Rooming Meeting in order to accomodate the needs of those who didn't get singles in singles meeting. Singles meeting is done this way because it is considered a separate sub-issue of choosing rooms.

Issues

Scarce resources

Singles meeting is a good example of the difficulty faced by consensus meetings that must allocate scarce resources ?. Here, the meeting participants are the ones seeking to benefit from the decision outcome and so have deeply vested interests in swerving the outcome to their favor. This complicates discussion dynamics, for if you have a concern with my reasons for wanting a single, it comes off as implicit support for your position.

For these reasons, it may be good to have as many impartial participants of possible, to keep the meeting focused on serving the best group interest. One way to get more participation is to encourage anyone to participate who might ever be interested in a single in the future. Concerns that come from impartial people will hold more weight because they have no conflict of interest. However, more participants means less confidentiality. It's uncertain whether this would make the meeting take longer or shorter, since it already takes several hours.

Another idea may be to start the meeting off anonymously, with reasons for wanting a single written down and read by the facilitator.

Recommendations to rooming meeting

As current policy stands, recommendations made to Rooming Meeting that come out of Singles meeting cannot be binding because that would violate the consensus power of the rest of the house. But they are weighted very heavily due to the time invested by the singles meeting participants.

Because of the danger that stubborn demands made in the small, confidential singles meeting could adversely affect the house, it may be a good idea to establish, by consensus as a house, a value system that prioritizes commonly expressed needs as a guiding policy for making rooming decisions. For example, it may be useful to consent to a policy that prioritized physical health over significant others as reasons for needing a single.

However, because of the varying needs and wants of the different people who come to singles' meeting each quarter, it is important that the meeting always be flexible and responsive to the specific people who are there. The beauty of consensus is that it allows each group to evaluate their group and individual priorities within the space of the singles' meeting, so allowing that to continue without strict dictates from the house should be a priority.