The Quarterly Conference & the Duty to Teach

Four times a year, in week thirteen of every quarter, the whole governing order of a NewVistas community gathers. The conference runs over one Saturday and one Sunday, in a fixed order: duty is taught before account is rendered. Saturday is the teaching day; Sunday is the reporting day.

The duty to teach

The founding QUORUM text of November 1831 states one formula four times: the duty of a president is to preside over those of the office, to sit in council with them, and to teach them their duty — for twelve, twenty-four, forty-eight, and ninety-six. In modern terms, a stand president presides over and teaches an office corps: twelve regulatory presidents, twenty-four data presidents, forty-eight origination presidents, or ninety-six village presidents (and the district presidents in seventy-two). The duty is laid on each individual president, never on a presidency as a body, and each president teaches exactly the duties of his or her own bureau to those who carry it.

There are two patterns. Where a corps is large enough to split — village and district presidents — each member carries one bureau and is taught by that bureau’s president alone. Where a corps is too small to split — origination, data, and regulatory presidents — each member carries all three bureaus of the department and is taught three times, separately, by its three presidents. Departments III, IV, and VIII have no office corps, because nothing they hold is distributed by village or district; their duty runs through the bureau councils and their Sunday report. The Trustee council is not taught: its members were taught in every corps they passed through.

Saturday: teaching

Fifteen bureaus have office corps, so fifteen presidents teach in each court and sixty across the four Segment courts, and every office corps in the community is taught on the same day. The morning is three forty-five-minute teaching blocks, one for each bureau of the teaching departments; the afternoon is three council blocks in which each office corps sits in council with its presidents. The teaching day carries no reporting, voting, or governing act, and nothing decided there binds anyone; a matter raised reaches governance only through the ordinary bodies.

Sunday: reporting

Sunday gathers all twenty-four stand seats. Each seat is a presidency of four mirrored across the four Segment courts, so each gives four simultaneous reports — ninety-six in all, in eight forty-five-minute blocks of three seats, in ascending bureau order, with a fifteen-minute break after every block to absorb any overrun. The west stand reports in the morning and early afternoon, the east stand after it. It is also where amendments are presented to every court before the vote.

The rest of week thirteen

The conference sits inside the thirteenth week, when ordinary governing cadence is suspended for communal restoration, celebration, and the community’s largest gatherings — so the year turns four times on teaching, accounting, and rest.

Constitution, §3.14 and §6.5. Publication protocols by Bureau 17.