How are decisions made in the consumer council?

The goal is to maximise self-management by giving people a say to the degree they are affected by decisions. Below are some possible approaches and techniques towards helping this goal and increasing participation.

Within meetings, councils could use participatory decision-making practices. These could include things like using round robins, paired listening, breakout groups, temperature checks, and using participatory hand signals, such as for making a direct point, a clarification, a technical point, jazz hands for agreement, etc. Roles could include a facilitator, a note taker and a time keeper that can all be rotated.

Members can make proposals for collective consumption, ideas are discussed, refined into fully costed projects, and then members make a final decision by voting. This could be by consensus or by majority rule depending on how they want to go about it.

The organisation seeds for change have excellent resources on participatory meetings. Here is one of their videos on consensus decision-making.