Thoughts on the Objective for an Intentional Community in SL

This is a first draft of a statement of purpose for our Intentional Community in Second Life, that I'm hoping we will discuss at our regular Sunday evening meeting. -- Cal

Our Purpose:

Our island is our Second Home, our return to the Garden. We resolve to live simply here, naturally, without things we don't need. 

We want to show that:

• a life based on principles of sufficiency, simplicity, responsibility, sustainability and harmony can be easy, enjoyable, enriching, healthy, liberating, and good for the environment;
• entertaining ourselves can be more fun than relying on others to create entertainment for us, and that learning from and with each other can be more fulfilling and capacity-building than having others inform us and tell us what to think and do; 
• communities do not need artificial environments, private property, leaders, boundaries, laws or restrictions to work and to be wonderful places to live; and
• decisions made and conflicts resolved by trusting and placing responsibility on each community member, or by consensus, are better than decisions made by majority vote or conflicts resolved by arguments, threats, third party intervention or violence.
  

We want to learn, by trial and error and study, how the most successful communities find and assess new members in a fair and equitable manner.

There are some aspects of living in a real-life intentional community that do not really apply in Second Life (e.g. making a living, dealing with children, pets, health and education issues, security against hostile outsiders, inequality of income and assets, discrimination, self-actualization, buying land and building shelter together, the need to collaborate, and acceptance of interdependence). We want to explore, through conversation and through research, how we might deal with these issues if we were in a real-life intentional community together.

We will do these things through:

• 'living' together in community, in a way consistent with this purpose and these principles, being a model that outsiders can see and study; 
• regular themed discussions on how we might deal with real-life intentional community issues;
• developing a process to identify and invite prospective new members to visit and to assess who should be a member of our community; and 
• creating our own simple, responsible, sustainable activities that allow us to have fun, share knowledge, and learn together.