Scenario. A ten-year-old cohousing community of twenty-four households wrote a charter when it was founded. The charter, which says things like "we raise children together" and "we eat dinner as a community at least twice a week," has lately felt either obsolete or aspirational depending on who you ask. Several new families don't share the original founders' sense of what the place is for; several founders have grown old and quiet. At the fall meeting, a facilitator, Vida, proposes a year-long process to re-articulate the charter — not start over, but deepen and clarify it — with everyone's voice in the room, before the community quietly drifts into being just a nice place to live.

Challenge: Design a "living charter" — a group's founding document structured to carry substantive value content about what the group is for, in terms rich enough to be contested, and revisable as the group learns without becoming a perpetual renegotiation. Produce the split between charter and policy, the procedure for reading the charter against operations, the revision mechanism, and the features that preserve its authority over time.