← Part of: Presidencies and Councils

The Presidencies of the Community

A mature NewVistas community is served by 1,920 presidents. They sit in four courts, one for each Segment – partnered men, partnered women, single men, and single women – and every seat in a court is matched by the same seat in the other three. The four presidents who hold one matching seat form a presidency of four. This page describes each kind of presidency in the community: what it covers, how it is formed, who confirms it, and how the presidencies combine into councils.

The three forms that every president belongs to – the presidency of three, the presidency of four, and the council of twelve – are described in Presidencies and Councils. Here the subject is the presidencies themselves, one kind at a time.

Three forms, one president

Every president always stands in all three forms at once. In a presidency of three, a president speaks with two others of the same Segment, and a concern is voiced there first. In a presidency of four, the president governs with one president from each of the other Segments, and decisions are made by three of the four. In a council of twelve, three presidencies of four bring their matters together under one relation, and decisions are made by seven of the twelve. Once any of these bodies has decided, every member carries the decision as the body’s own.

None of these bodies stands above another. Each president holds one office, in one room, with one fixed place in the seating, and no office is a step toward another. Accountability therefore runs across the 1,920 seats, rather than up a chain.

The 480 presidencies of four

The 1,920 seats make 480 presidencies of four. They fall into seven kinds, which differ in what each one covers:

Presidencies	How many	Each one covers	Bureaus
Village	288	One village, for one bureau – three in every village	1 Inventory, 2 Facilities, 3 Equipment
District	72	One district, for one bureau – three in every district	4 Food/Health, 5 Life Plan, 6 Leisure
Origination	48	One district building, all three bureaus – two in every building	19 Schema, 20 Markets, 21 Underwriting
Data	24	One district building, all three bureaus – one in every building	16 Accounting, 17 Publication, 18 Metrics
Bureau	24	One bureau, for the whole community	One each, Bureaus 1 to 24
Regulatory	12	A pair of bureaus, n and n + 12, for the whole community	13 Innovation, 14 Legal, 15 Audit
Trustee	12	A pair of bureaus, n and n + 12, for the whole community	All twenty-four
Total	480

The presidencies fall into three groups, according to what they are tied to.

Tied to a place and a bureau. The village and district presidencies are the only ones that serve both a place and a single bureau. Each village has three, one each for Bureaus 1, 2 and 3, and each district has three, one each for Bureaus 4, 5 and 6. In this way six bureaus reach every participant where they live. A village or district presidency is taught its duty by the president of its own bureau – the Bureau 1 president teaches the ninety-six Bureau 1 village presidents, for instance – and carries that bureau’s system into its village or district. In this way the village and district presidencies bring the governance of these six bureaus close to the participants. They carry observations on how each system could be improved up to the presidency of their bureau, and refer other matters to the presidency concerned – especially for bureaus that have no village or district presidencies, such as Bureaus 7, 8 and 9, which keep the community’s title.
Tied to a building. Each of the twenty-four district buildings has two Origination presidencies and one Data presidency. Each of them carries all three bureaus of its department in that building, and is taught three times, separately, by the three presidents of the department. Together, the three presidencies of a building form its data and origination council. The first Data and Origination presidencies of each building are seated by the trustees – before the closing, by the founding council’s Trustee presidency, with the approval of the full council – and from then on each renews itself.
Serving the whole community. The twenty-four Bureau presidencies – the Operating presidencies, one for each bureau – sit at the centre of the stands at either end of each court. The twelve Regulatory and twelve Trustee presidencies each carry a pair of bureaus, so that twelve of each are enough for all twenty-four. Departments III, IV and VIII – Title, Platforms, and Infrastructure – have no presidents in villages or districts, because what they hold is kept once for the whole community: title in three repositories, one platform beneath every bureau, and single networks of materials, utilities, and transportation.

The councils of twelve

The same 480 presidencies combine into councils of twelve. Five kinds bring together three presidencies of four, from all four Segments:

Council	How many	Made up of	What it does
Village council	96	The Bureau 1, 2 and 3 presidencies of one village	Governs the village
District council	24	The Bureau 4, 5 and 6 presidencies of one district	Governs the district
Bureau council	24	One Trustee, one Regulatory, and one Bureau presidency	Sets its bureau’s standard
Data and origination council	24	One Data and two Origination presidencies	Serves its district building
Department coordination council	8	The three Bureau presidencies of one department	Coordinates only; decides nothing

Because no bureau council draws all three of its presidencies from one body, no bureau governs itself. In addition, two councils in each court are made of twelve individual seats of one Segment – the twelve trustees at the west end of the inner court, and the twelve regulators at the east end – eight in all. Each president also stands in a presidency of three: 608 Segment presidencies of three, which advocate for their Segment, and 32 department presidencies of three, which report each department’s bureaus at the quarterly conference.

The founding council and the Branch Presidencies

Two more bodies complete the picture.

The founding council. The twelve who start the community form three presidencies of four – Trustee, Regulatory, and Operating – and continue for the life of the community as the board of its nonprofit foundation. The founding council alone carries the community’s dealings with the civil authorities. It does not add seats to the courts. Over time it evolves into one of the 480 presidencies of the courts, and by the time the full conference is seated, its first members will long since have been released and replaced by draw. Like every other presidency, it holds no seniority over the rest.
Branch Presidencies. The four floor captains of each apartment building form its Branch Presidency, 960 in a mature community. Floor captains are part-time and unpaid, and serve the residents of their building rather than govern them. They meet on Monday with the presidencies of four, but never combine into a council of twelve.

How the presidencies are formed

Every presidency is formed once, at its first seating, and from then on renews itself. As the community grows, the founding council creates each presidency in turn, only with the approval of the full council, and holds that presidency’s duties in trust until the day it is seated:

When	The founding council seats	New presidents
The first building	Its Operating presidency serves as the building’s first four floor captains	–
Each later building, through the tenth	The building’s Branch Presidency, drawn from residents already renting	4
Ten buildings	The village council: the Bureau 1, 2 and 3 presidencies	12
Forty buildings	The district council: the Bureau 4, 5 and 6 presidencies	12
Each district building opens	Through its Trustee presidency, the building’s Data presidency and two Origination presidencies	12
Eight districts	The bureau presidencies: twelve Trustee, twelve Regulatory, and twenty-four Operating	192

After the closing at eight districts, the bureaus seat the presidencies that remain – Bureau 1 the Branch Presidencies, Bureau 2 the village presidencies, and Bureau 5 the district presidencies – and the trustees seat the Data and Origination presidencies of each new district building. Once a presidency is seated, the body that seated it takes no further part in governing it.

Each presidency then renews one seat a year, on the departing president’s birthday, through qualification, narrowing, and a random draw, so that three experienced presidents are always serving. Every term is four years, and every president serves between the ages of thirty and seventy-two.

Who confirms each presidency

Each president is confirmed by those he or she serves. A floor captain is confirmed by the Unit on that floor, a village presidency by its village, a district presidency by its district, and the bureau presidencies, which serve the whole community, by all its adults. In this way every participant has a vote, and every one of the 1,920 presidents and 3,840 floor captains answers to a defined group of people.

How the presidencies meet

All the bodies meet for forty-five minutes, starting at nine in the morning, on a fixed weekly cadence through the first twelve weeks of each quarter. The presidencies of four meet every Monday. The trustee and regulatory councils meet on Tuesdays, the department coordination councils on the second Tuesday, and the presidencies of three on the fourth. The village, district, and data and origination councils meet every Thursday, and the bureau councils on alternate Thursdays. In every body, presiding and keeping the record rotate in a fixed order, so that no president becomes a permanent chair and no room becomes a head office.

The governing bodies keep the same rule as every rented room: use runs forty-five minutes from the hour, and the last quarter hour is the changeover, for the company leaving and the company arriving.