A Room with a Door

The Bixbus Event Collective was founded at an evening meeting in a side room of the Bixbus Community Centre, six months after the first Founders' Day. Lisa Smith had convened it. She had come out of that day convinced that the settlement wanted occasions of its kind and that she could not go on running them alone, and she had spent the intervening months finding out who might share the work.

Around fifteen people came. Leena Heikki, who had run the Founders' Day meal and was by then some seven months pregnant with her first child, sat nearest the door. Dominic Faulkner, a sound engineer and musician who had become the settlement's unofficial keeper of instruments and speakers, brought a list of every piece of equipment he knew of in Bixbus and who held it. Sergio Aveskamp, who had carried tables for Lisa on the main road the previous July, came from a shift in the stores. The rest were cooks, artisans, and volunteers, several of whom had first met one another at the bonfire.

The room itself was the first item of business. The Community Centre had agreed to let the group use it for meetings and to store equipment in a cupboard at the back, and for an organisation that until then had kept its tables in other people's tents, a room with a door was a considerable thing. The Centre asked only that the Collective leave the room as it found it, and that its events be open to anyone.

Lisa arrived with a typed outline of what the Collective might be and do. It set out a purpose, to plan and host public gatherings that served the whole settlement rather than only those already at home in it, along with a calendar, a list of roles, and a set of rules for borrowing equipment. Leena, who preferred to let an evening find its own shape, argued against most of the calendar and some of the rules. The two women disagreed openly and without heat, and the meeting adopted the purpose and the borrowing rules and left the calendar for later.

Not everyone was persuaded the Collective should exist. One of the volunteers asked whether the effort it would take might be better spent on housing, with most of the settlement still living in the Tent Community. Lisa answered that the two were not in competition and that the people who most needed a gathering were often the ones least able to find their way to one. The volunteer stayed for the rest of the meeting but did not return to the next.

The meeting settled the name, the Bixbus Event Collective, after a short discussion in which several longer alternatives were proposed and dropped. Lisa was named its convenor without a vote. The Collective's first commitment was to run the next Founders' Festival, to be held over several days rather than one. Dominic agreed to take charge of sound and equipment. Sergio offered to work out what the stores could spare and when.

Leena left before the end, tired, and promised to cook for the first event whether or not she was still upright to serve it. By the time the meeting closed, most of the tasks it had agreed upon had been assigned to Lisa. She stayed behind afterwards to write them up, and to return the room to the state in which the Centre had lent it.