Around 18 working groups carry more than 70 per cent of the shared tasks: the ForumsEhren, the backbone of self-management.
Who actually runs the Forum? Short answer: the Forum. The longer one is in § 15 of the statutes, where the ForumsEhren are anchored as organs of self-management: voluntary working groups of the members with the right to decide independently within their field. More than 70 per cent of the shared tasks work this way, which comes to at least two hours a month per member, and more for those who feel like putting in more.
The range is wide. The courtyard group and the working group for facade greening keep the courtyards alive, the energy group watches over the combined heat and power units and the heat pumps, housing allocation decides on flats that become free, and on the roof a group looks after the bee colonies. Each group organises itself: its own meetings, its own minutes, filed in the shared cloud.
How a working group comes about
That is regulated too, but deliberately kept easy. Members who want to raise a topic or start a new group bring it to the ForumsEhren working group or to the general meeting. Many of the Forum’s present institutions began like this, the Vorratskammer for instance as an ordering group of six people.
Besides the working groups there are individual roles such as cellar allocation and the house coordinators, who look after safety, cleanliness and social matters in the stairwells, and open formats such as the monthly Forum im Gespräch. All groups at a glance:
