Tamera Forum
Details
- Author: Sabine Lichtenfels, Dieter Duhm, and the Bauhütte project (developed 1978)
- Category: Frameworks
- Published: 1978
- Source: Tamera Peace Research and Education Center
- Source URL: https://www.tamera.org/forum/
- Access: public
Description
A ritualized practice of transparent self-disclosure inside a witnessing circle, developed in the Black Forest in 1978 and held daily at Tamera since the community's founding.
Annotation
Forum is a structured group practice in which one person at a time enters the empty center of a witnessing circle, expresses what is alive for them through speech and physical action, receives interventions from a trained facilitator, and afterward receives short reflections (called mirrors) from members of the group. A session lasts roughly 60 to 90 minutes. The circle holds 15 to 50 participants. The practice is held weekly or daily depending on the community.
Forum was developed in 1978 in a predecessor community to Tamera, in the Black Forest of southern Germany. Twelve people lived in a rented farmhouse for 500 German marks. Half the day was relational work, half was research. The diagnosis underneath the practice: the political movements of 1968 had failed to address the relational and erotic substrate of human violence, and any culture that wanted to end war had to make suppressed life energies sayable. The theatrical framing was deliberate. By staging jealousy or fear or longing as a performance in the center of the circle, the person could make contact with the material without being identified as the material.
Forum is the relational layer underneath governance, not a substitute for it. Communities that practice Forum almost always also use a separate procedural framework for decisions: sociocracy, consent-based decision-making, council, or formal voting. Tamera's own evolution in 2021 to 2026 illustrates this directly: Forum was the central practice for thirty years, and the community has now added sociocracy alongside it after a community consolidation process facilitated by Miki Kashtan.
In the ToGather archive, five Tamera members describe Forum from their own experience: Sabine Lichtenfels (co-founder), Bori (joined 1987), Joshua Gottenko, Uri Ayalon, and Aida Shibli. Each describes the practice differently and each describes its costs honestly. Tamera does not present Forum as a finished or solved technology, and that ambivalence is itself part of what makes the practice trustworthy as a reference for other groups.
Full text
## What it is, and what it is for
Forum is a structured group practice in which one person at a time enters the empty center of a circle, expresses what is alive for them through speech and physical action, receives interventions from a trained facilitator, and afterward receives short reflections (called *mirrors*) from members of the witnessing group. A session lasts roughly 60 to 90 minutes. The circle holds 15 to 50 participants. The practice is held weekly or daily depending on the community.
The canonical definition, written by Dolores Richter and Achim Ecker of ZEGG (the sister community where Forum was further developed): *"Forum is not therapy, nor is it a method in itself; rather, it is a ritualized form of communication designed to enhance transparency, spiritual growth and community."* What Forum produces is shared awareness of material that ordinary conversation cannot hold, including jealousy, longing, fear, attraction, conflict, and the parts of community life that get pushed underground when people only meet for tasks.
The practice is built for residential or close-contact groups of 15 to 50 people who carry ongoing relational material together over years. It assumes physical co-presence, time investment, and willingness to be visible to the group. Likely fit: long-running intentional communities, ecovillages, residential cohousing, deep-relationship activist collectives, retreat-based learning communities. Less likely fit: distributed remote organizations, transactional teams, short-duration projects, contexts where confidentiality is a structural requirement.
Forum is the *relational layer* underneath governance, not a substitute for it. Communities that practice Forum almost always also use a separate procedural framework for decisions: sociocracy, consent-based decision-making, council, or a formal voting process. [Tamera's](/community/tamera) own evolution in 2021 to 2026 (described later in this entry) is a useful illustration of this: Forum was the central practice for thirty years, and the community has now added sociocracy alongside it.
> **From the field.** Across the [five Tamera interviews](/community/tamera) in the ToGather archive, every member returns to Forum as the practice that defines what makes Tamera Tamera. [Bori](/interview/69679d7f7b6c253b7c649656) calls it "one of our social technologies." [Joshua](/interview/69679e0dbb287c49bb10b855) calls it "the strongest tool we have." [Uri](/interview/69679eb293c58a9d74cdec44) calls it the moment he felt at home, after a lifetime of being told he could not keep secrets. [Sabine](/interview/695d9ee2f8fbd260831381e0), who helped develop the practice in 1978, talks about both what it makes possible and what it costs the people who hold it. Five people, five framings. The thing they describe is the same practice.
## Where Forum came from
Forum was developed not in [Tamera](/community/tamera) but in a predecessor project: a small communal experiment in the Black Forest of southern Germany, founded in 1978 by [Sabine Lichtenfels](/interview/695d9ee2f8fbd260831381e0), Dieter Duhm, Charly Rainer Ehrenpreis, and others. The group rented a farmhouse for 500 German marks. Twelve people moved in. The frame was research: how does a culture have to look so that there is no war?
Two diagnoses shaped what came next. First, that the political movements of 1968, which most of the group had been part of, had failed to address the relational and erotic substrate of human violence. As Sabine described it in [her interview for the ToGather archive](/interview/695d9ee2f8fbd260831381e0): *"I personally was engaged in different left-wing communities or parties. And then I noticed, wow, the same corruption, the same jealousy, all the things are going on here too. And this brought me more radically to the decision, we have to find something on a deeper level."* Second, that the suppression of life energies (sexuality, longing, fear, grief) was itself a structural cause of violence, and that any culture that wanted to end war had to make those energies sayable.
The group ran a three-year experiment in becoming, in Sabine's words, "like in a marriage with a group." Half the day was relational work. The other half was research. The relational work needed a vehicle. They invented one.
> *"We started to develop the Forum where we make performances where, for example, if you feel very jealous, we were invited to bring the jealousy to the stage to express what is going on inside of us and then to notice that's not me. It's my trauma point. It's my story."*
>
> [Sabine Lichtenfels](/interview/695d9ee2f8fbd260831381e0), co-founder of Tamera, in conversation with Sharon Avraham.
The theatrical framing was deliberate. By staging jealousy (or fear, or longing, or rage) as a performance in the center of a witnessing circle, the person could make contact with the material without being identified as the material. The disidentification move (*this is my trauma point, this is my story, this is not who I am*) is the conceptual core of Forum and remains the move that distinguishes it from therapy or confession.
The Black Forest period also produced a controversy that Tamera still talks about. The group played what they called the "master-slave game" in daily life, exploring the question of how love expresses through service. Combined with their public openness about exploring free sexuality, the practice attracted German press coverage that called them a "Hospital of Sex." [Sabine](/interview/695d9ee2f8fbd260831381e0) described that period as the deepest teaching she received in how fear creates accusation. The press history is part of Forum's lineage and worth knowing about; the practice did not come from a neutral place.
In 1991, part of the group split off to found [ZEGG](/community/zegg) (the Centre for Experimental Cultural and Social Design) in Bad Belzig, northeast Germany. ZEGG developed its own variant of Forum, more theatrical and amplified. In 1995, the remaining founders bought 154 hectares of degraded farmland in the Alentejo region of Portugal in a one-week decision window after the previous owner ran out of money, and Tamera began. Forum traveled with them. It has been the central social practice at Tamera for thirty years.
## How a Forum session actually runs
The procedural detail below comes from two sources: the canonical ZEGG Forum article by Dolores Richter and Achim Ecker (cited at the end), and the descriptions given to Sharon by four members of Tamera in the ToGather archive interviews. Where Tamera and ZEGG diverge in practice, both are noted.
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### Setup
The group sits in a complete circle. No tables, no laptops, everyone visible to everyone. The center is empty. A trained facilitator and co-facilitator hold the time and the safety of the practice. The ideal group size, per the canonical ZEGG description, is 15 to 35 people; Tamera has historically run sessions up to 40 or 50.
### The flow of a session
**Opening.** Brief grounding, naming of the time-frame, and reminder of the agreement that what is shared in the circle stays in the circle. The facilitator may attune the group through silence or a short ritual.
**Stepping in.** A person who has something alive in them stands up, walks to the center, and enters the stage. Entry is voluntary. In a community that runs Forum often, several people will enter over the course of a session.
**The work.** The presenter speaks, moves, gestures, sometimes shouts, sometimes whispers, sometimes stays in silence. They are not interrupted by witnesses. The facilitator intervenes from time to time, asking a question, suggesting a movement, inviting an exaggeration, or asking the presenter to repeat a phrase, change posture, or address a specific witness.
**Mirrors.** After the presenter sits back down, the facilitator opens the floor for mirrors. Witnesses can step into the center one at a time and offer a short reflection of what they saw, perceived, or felt. Mirrors are not advice, judgment, or fix. They are gifts to the presenter from the field.
**Next presenter.** Another person stands and enters the center. The cycle repeats until the time is full or the field rests.
**Closing.** The facilitator closes the time-frame with a short grounding. People are asked to take care of themselves and each other in the hours that follow, since material has surfaced that needs metabolizing.
### The three styles of facilitation
Per the canonical ZEGG description by Richter and Ecker, Forum facilitation is not neutral but takes one of three broad styles, often within the same session:
- **Soft moderation through questions.** The facilitator stays mostly outside the work and asks questions that lead the presenter back to the source of what is alive: "What is underneath that?" "Who are you talking to right now?" "What is the body doing?"
- **Playful and artistic.** The facilitator uses theatrical interventions: asks the presenter to repeat a phrase, walk in a circle, speak from a different corner of the stage for a different aspect of themselves, use a sound instead of a word. The Kido Forum variant at Tamera ([Joshua's interview describes one](/interview/69679e0dbb287c49bb10b855)) is mostly in this register, working with energy and embodiment rather than narrative content.
- **Strict and directive.** The facilitator interrupts a familiar pattern, tells the presenter to stop a habitual gesture, or names a defense the presenter is using. This style is reserved for cases where a softer intervention has not produced movement and the field is asking for more.
One specific facilitation move from Richter and Ecker, useful for understanding what facilitators actually do: *"If one person envies a quality of another, the facilitator may ask him or her to express that quality playfully, to act as if she has the quality herself. In this way, the presenter can find out whether there is a hidden quality in her that wants to emerge, and lead her to embrace and strengthen it by acting it out."* This is the disidentification move in microcosm.
### What a real Forum moment looks like
[Joshua](/interview/69679e0dbb287c49bb10b855) described one of his most powerful Forum experiences, watching a Kido Forum session at Tamera:
> *"A young man, one of the biggest and strongest in the community, was guided by the Forum leader. He was told to walk around the circle and repeat, 'I am the biggest and the strongest.' At first, he was shy and unsure. But as he kept walking, something changed. He repeated the phrase for about fifteen minutes. Each time he went around, you could feel a shift. Everyone was on the edge of their seat, watching him grow stronger. By the end, he walked out of that circle radiating real strength."*
>
> [Joshua Gottenko](/interview/69679e0dbb287c49bb10b855), member of Tamera, in conversation with Sharon Avraham.
### Frequency and rhythm
[Joshua](/interview/69679e0dbb287c49bb10b855) described the historical rhythm at Tamera at peak: four or five sub-groups called "pillars" of 20 to 40 people each, with Forum in those small groups four days a week, plus one big community Forum a week. That comes to roughly twenty Forums per month for the active community. [Uri's interview](/interview/69679eb293c58a9d74cdec44) adds that for many years a daily 4pm Forum work block was the spine of the day, alongside morning attunement, three shared meals, and the siesta.
That rhythm has changed. [Joshua](/interview/69679e0dbb287c49bb10b855) describes the current pattern as community days three times a month with 20 to 40 people. [Uri](/interview/69679eb293c58a9d74cdec44) describes the diversification: the platform, the test field, and the place of children all run their own Forums now, and the whole community comes together less often. This shift is itself part of the Forum story and is discussed in the *Where it gets hard* section below.
## What Forum is and what it is not
Some clarifications that come up often when groups consider adopting Forum:
- **Forum is not group therapy.** There is no clinician. The facilitator is a trained community member, not a credentialed professional. The orientation is toward awareness in service of community, not toward symptom relief or diagnosis.
- **Forum is not a decision-making framework.** It does not produce decisions. It produces shared awareness. Communities that practice Forum almost always run a separate procedural framework for the operational layer: sociocracy, consent-based decision-making, council. [Tamera](/community/tamera) in 2021 explicitly added sociocracy alongside Forum after a community consolidation process; the two now run together.
- **Forum is not the same as Council, Bohm Dialogue, or NVC.** Council uses a talking piece and equal turns. Bohm Dialogue suspends agenda and decision entirely and observes the field of group thought. NVC is a four-step communication framework usable in any setting. Forum is closer to staged improvisation with a witnessing audience and a facilitator playing director.
- **Forum is not a confessional.** Confession asks for absolution. Forum asks for awareness. The mirrors that follow a presentation are reflections, not blessings.
- **Forum pairs well with other practices.** Per Richter and Ecker, Forum combines productively with Co-Counseling, Nonviolent Communication, and Constellation Work. Many practitioners use NVC as the everyday relational layer and Forum as the deeper periodic surfacing.
## Communities practicing Forum (or a sibling form)
Three communities in the ToGather archive practice Forum or a directly related transparent-communication framework. Notes below come from interviews and field visits, not from secondary sources.
### [Tamera](/community/tamera) (Alentejo, Portugal, founded 1995, ~170 residents)
The community where Forum has been held longest in continuous practice. Five members are interviewed in the ToGather archive: [Aida Shibli](/interview/69679f304dc0c1c3df87288b), [Bori](/interview/69679d7f7b6c253b7c649656), [Joshua Gottenko](/interview/69679e0dbb287c49bb10b855), [Sabine Lichtenfels](/interview/695d9ee2f8fbd260831381e0), and [Uri Ayalon](/interview/69679eb293c58a9d74cdec44). Forum surfaces in every interview as the central relational tool. [Sabine's interview](/interview/695d9ee2f8fbd260831381e0) in particular includes the founding-era account of how Forum was developed in the Black Forest in 1978. [Joshua's](/interview/69679e0dbb287c49bb10b855) includes the Kido Forum example quoted above. [Uri's](/interview/69679eb293c58a9d74cdec44) includes his account of feeling at home in Forum after a lifetime of being told he could not keep secrets. The frequency of Forum at Tamera has reduced from roughly twenty sessions a month at peak to community days three times a month now, and the community is openly working with that change.
### [ZEGG](/community/zegg) (Bad Belzig, Germany, founded 1991, ~100 residents)
Sister practice from the same Bauhütte root. ZEGG split off from the predecessor community in 1991 and has developed its own variant of Forum: more theatrical, more amplified, with the central person sometimes invited to dramatize inner material rather than only speak it. ZEGG also runs sociocracy alongside Forum. The canonical written account of Forum (Richter and Ecker, cited in resources) was written from ZEGG. ZEGG is in the ToGather archive as documented but not yet interviewed.
### [Network for a New Culture (NFNC)](https://www.networkfornewculture.org/) (United States, ongoing since 1994)
North American adaptation. NFNC adapted Forum from ZEGG and Tamera in the late 1990s and runs Forum trainings at week-long summer camps in Oregon, West Virginia, and Hawaii. Their version places more emphasis on the polyamory and intimate-relationship layer than Tamera's version does. Not yet documented in the ToGather archive but worth referencing for readers in the United States who want to begin Forum work without traveling to Europe.
> **From the field.** A pattern from the interviews worth flagging. The members at Tamera who described Forum to me had different relationships to it. [Bori](/interview/69679d7f7b6c253b7c649656), who has been there since 1987, framed it warmly and as fundamentally simple. [Joshua](/interview/69679e0dbb287c49bb10b855), who arrived in 2008, described it as deeply meaningful but also as something the community now does less of than it used to. [Sabine](/interview/695d9ee2f8fbd260831381e0), who helped develop the practice forty-eight years ago, described the long arc with full honesty about its costs, the projections that gather around the leader, and the difficulty of sustaining a practice across generations. [Uri](/interview/69679eb293c58a9d74cdec44) described the moment he first felt at home in it. None of them described Forum as a finished or solved technology. That ambivalence is itself part of what Forum is.
## How to begin practicing this in your own group
The honest answer is that Forum is a trained practice. [Tamera](/community/tamera), [ZEGG](/community/zegg), and [Network for a New Culture](https://www.networkfornewculture.org/) all run multi-day to multi-week trainings, and the consensus across practitioners is that you should not try to lead Forum without that training. What follows is not a substitute for training; it is a way to begin to make the conditions in which Forum can later be introduced.
**1. Establish the circle as a ritual space, not just a meeting.** Before you try Forum, build a baseline of regular gatherings where the group sits in a complete circle (no tables, no laptops), holds a defined opening and closing, and treats what is said inside as confidential to the room. The Way of Council practice (separate library entry, forthcoming) is the gentlest entry point. Six months of weekly check-in circles changes what is possible to bring into a Forum later.
**2. Send members for training, then invite practitioners in.** [Tamera](https://www.tamera.org/learn/community-service-2025/) offers a Community Course (multi-week residency) and dedicated Forum trainings. [ZEGG](https://www.zegg-forum.org/en/) offers similar trainings in German and English. [NFNC](https://www.networkfornewculture.org/) offers shorter formats at summer camps in the United States. Sending two or three members of your group through one of these is the most reliable way to bring the practice back authentically. Once your members have trained, invite an experienced practitioner to lead the first three to five Forums in your group rather than improvising from a written description.
**3. Start small and slow.** Begin with shorter sessions of 60 to 90 minutes (the canonical length per Richter and Ecker), smaller circles of 8 to 15 people, and lower-intensity material. The full Tamera-scale Forum (community-wide, multi-hour, intimate disclosure) requires years of trust accumulation. Trying to skip to that intensity tends to produce harm rather than healing.
**4. Build the mirror practice as a separate skill.** Mirroring (offering a short reflection of what you perceived without advice, judgment, or fix) is a learnable skill in its own right. Practice mirrors in pairs or triads outside of Forum. Quaker clearness committee discipline (separate library entry, forthcoming) and Nonviolent Communication trainings are useful complementary preparation, since both insist on the discipline of speaking only what is yours.
**5. Pair Forum with a procedural decision-making framework.** Forum is for relational material. It does not replace a decision-making method. Communities that practice Forum almost always run sociocracy, consent-based decision-making, or council governance for the operational decisions. If you do not yet have a decision-making framework, building one is a prerequisite, not a parallel project. See the entries in the Decision-Making collection of this library (forthcoming).
**6. Plan for the year-three reckoning.** Multiple practitioners describe a pattern where Forum is enthusiastically adopted, intensifies for two to three years, and then either stabilizes into ongoing practice or quietly fades. The year-three reckoning is when the group has accumulated enough material together to test whether the trust the practice generates is durable. Plan for the moment, do not be surprised by it. [Tamera's](/community/tamera) own 2021 reckoning, prompted by external facilitator Miki Kashtan's observation that "Tamera is a low-trust environment," is described in the next section.
## Living examples and entry points for community builders
Forum is not an archived practice. It is running right now.
At [Tamera](/community/tamera), community days with Forum happen three times a month, with smaller sub-group Forums running more frequently across the different working areas of the community. At [ZEGG](/community/zegg), Forum is held regularly and ZEGG runs annual Forum trainings that draw practitioners from across Europe. The [Network for a New Culture](https://www.networkfornewculture.org/) runs Forum-based summer camps in Oregon, West Virginia, and Hawaii every year, with 50 to 100 participants per camp practicing Forum daily across an immersive week. These are not heritage events. They are ongoing practice communities, and all three welcome outside participants.
Beyond the three home communities, Forum practices have spread through adjacent networks. The GEN (Global Ecovillage Network) CLIPS curriculum includes a Forum module, which means facilitators are being trained inside ecovillage networks across Europe, Africa, and the Americas. The ZEGG Forum Working Group maintains a practitioner network connecting people who have been trained and are building Forum practice in their own communities. Urban co-living houses in Germany and the Netherlands have experimented with monthly Forum-style transparent communication evenings, shorter and less intense than the residential form, as a way to surface relational material that ordinary house meetings cannot hold.
For community builders who are not yet in a residential setting, the most relevant entry point is often not Forum itself but the research question underneath it: what happens to the relational material your group does not surface? Most groups suppress jealousy, attraction, fear, and unspoken resentment until those things accumulate as politics. Forum is Tamera's answer to that suppression. Any group building a constitution or a governance structure should ask the same question and think about what their answer will be, before the suppression has already happened.
**Entry points for community builders**
The lightest entry is observation. Tamera's open programs, including Summer University and Introduction to Tamera weeks, include Forum sessions that outside participants can witness. Attending one Forum at Tamera or ZEGG before deciding whether to introduce the practice into your own group is recommended by all three practitioner communities.
For practitioners in North America, the NFNC summer camp is the most accessible entry point. One week, immersive, with daily Forum, facilitation training, and a community that has been running the practice in the North American context for thirty years. The format is designed for people exploring whether to bring Forum home.
If traveling is not possible, the GEN CLIPS module "The Forum: Truth, Trust and Transformation" is available online and provides a structured introduction to the theory and practice before you have encountered it in person. Use it to build a shared vocabulary inside your group, not to substitute for in-person training.
The ZEGG Forum Working Group maintains an online network where community facilitators share practice notes and offer peer consultation. Useful for staying in contact with the practitioner community while building readiness.
One caution: do not attempt to lead Forum without training. The practice requires a skilled facilitator, and improvising the facilitation role from a written description tends to produce harm rather than healing. The entry points above are for building readiness and finding the right trainer, not for immediate self-taught adoption.
## Where it gets hard
Tamera is unusually direct about the limits of Forum, more so than most published frameworks are about themselves. The five tensions below come from the interviews in this archive and from Tamera's published reflections.
**Forum requires real safety, and real safety is not always present.** The practice depends on what [Bori](/interview/69679d7f7b6c253b7c649656) called "a circle of trust." In groups where there are unresolved power asymmetries (founders versus newer members, men versus women in mixed-gender groups, white members versus members of color in mostly-white groups), Forum can amplify rather than resolve those asymmetries. [Aida Shibli's interview](/interview/69679f304dc0c1c3df87288b) in this archive says it directly: "When a group lives together without facing the systems that make separation, those systems enter the group again." Forum does not substitute for doing the structural work on power.
**The 2021 low-trust reckoning.** In 2021, [Tamera](/community/tamera) hosted a community consolidation process facilitated by Miki Kashtan. [Joshua's interview](/interview/69679e0dbb287c49bb10b855) describes the moment Kashtan said directly to the community: "Tamera is a low-trust environment. You need to face that." For a community that had described Forum as the technology that builds trust, hearing this from a respected outside facilitator was a turning point. Joshua: "Hearing it from someone respected made it real. Since then, a lot has shifted. The old leadership structures were challenged, and space opened for renewal. We began experimenting with sociocracy and consent-based decision-making." The year-three reckoning, on a thirty-year arc.
**The leader carries projections, and the projections corrode the leader.** In [her interview](/interview/695d9ee2f8fbd260831381e0), [Sabine Lichtenfels](/interview/695d9ee2f8fbd260831381e0) (Tamera's co-founder and most experienced Forum facilitator) describes the cost of being held as a "natural authority" by the community over decades. The shadow of projection runs in both directions: the founder is seen as more than she is, and as more responsible for collective failure than she is. Sabine's own framing: "I had to learn not to identify with either this big mother or the shadow mother but to stay faithful to what I believe is true." She also describes hearing "negative voices years later" about Forums she had led, which arrived too late to be worked with directly. Communities adopting Forum often do not anticipate how heavily the facilitation role weighs on the people who hold it.
**Public self-disclosure is not neutral across cultures.** The Forum practice carries strong cultural assumptions: that personal expression is healthy, that emotion is best made visible, that the witnessing group has a right to see the inner life of the speaker. These assumptions are not universal. [Uri's interview](/interview/69679eb293c58a9d74cdec44) captures a small version of this inside Tamera itself: as someone from Israeli-Palestinian Tel Aviv culture, he had to spend years learning to quiet his immediate impulse to interrupt and disagree, to fit the German-rooted Forum form. In groups with members from cultures where dignity is held through restraint or where private suffering is considered a private matter, Forum can be experienced as coercive even when it is offered as voluntary. Worth taking seriously, not dismissing.
**The next generation does not always carry the practice forward.** [Joshua's interview](/interview/69679e0dbb287c49bb10b855) describes the shift from twenty Forums per month at peak to community days three times a month now. [Bori's interview](/interview/69679d7f7b6c253b7c649656) describes the parallel shift as the children of founding members became parents themselves and family structures partially replaced communal ones: "the family became much more dominant than it was in earlier times. And for this, then you have love couples that care for their children. And then to have in this system free love is really difficult." These are not failures, but they are real. A practice held by founders does not automatically transfer to the next generation, and the question of how to renew Forum across generations is one Tamera is openly working with right now, including through the 2026 launch of a new three-year educational accompaniment program for incoming members after a decade of not welcoming new permanent residents.
> *"For me, when I did Forum I heard negative voices years later and I thought, wow, and I know many communities fail because of this. If you look at Damanhur, if you look at Findhorn, it's deep work."*
>
> [Sabine Lichtenfels](/interview/695d9ee2f8fbd260831381e0), co-founder of Tamera.
## More resources
### Canonical primary sources
- [Forum: A Social Technology for Transparency in Community](https://www.tamera.org/forum/). Tamera's own foundational explanation. Start here.
- [What is ZEGG-Forum? by Dolores Richter and Achim Ecker (PDF)](https://www.zegg-forum.org/images/PDF/Articles/ZEGG-Forum-article.pdf). The most complete written account of how Forum works in practice. Includes facilitator role, three styles of facilitation, and the disidentification move. The procedural backbone of this Library entry.
- [Conflict Resolution in a Community of Trust](https://www.tamera.org/community-conflict-resolution/). How Forum sits inside the broader conflict-resolution architecture at Tamera.
- [ZEGG Forum guidelines](https://www.zegg-forum.org/en/our-guidelines.html). The procedural agreements that hold a ZEGG-style Forum together.
### Trainings and residencies
- [Tamera Community Course](https://www.tamera.org/learn/community-service-2025/). Multi-week residential program. The standard entry point for outside practitioners. Includes Forum participation under experienced leadership.
- [Introduction to Tamera (short course)](https://www.tamera.org/learn/introduction-to-tamera/). For people who want a first taste before committing to the full Community Course.
- [The Forum: Truth, Trust and Transformation](https://clips.gen-europe.org/the-forum-truth-trust-transformation-2/). Forum training delivered through GEN Europe's CLIPS curriculum.
- [Network for a New Culture summer camps](https://www.networkfornewculture.org/). North American adaptation of Forum, run as immersive summer camps in Oregon, West Virginia, and Hawaii.
### Theoretical lineage
- *The Sacred Matrix: From the Matrix of Violence to the Matrix of Life* by Dieter Duhm (2005). The theoretical foundation Tamera's founders work from. Underpins both Forum and the broader Tamera vision.
- [Dialogue: A Proposal](http://www.david-bohm.net/dialogue/dialogue_proposal.html) by David Bohm (1991). Bohm's notion of the implicate order is referenced by Tamera as part of Forum's philosophical underpinning. Worth reading directly rather than only through Tamera's framing.
- ZEGG Forum: A Ritualized Form of Communication for Larger Groups, on Grassroots Economic Organizing (geo.coop). Independent third-party documentation of how ZEGG Forum works in practice. Useful as a check on the community's own framing.
### Companion frameworks (separate Library entries, forthcoming)
- **Way of Council.** A gentler entry point for groups that are not ready for full Forum intensity. Builds the circle-as-ritual baseline that Forum requires.
- **Nonviolent Communication (NVC).** The mirror practice in Forum is a learnable skill. NVC training is one good way to develop it before introducing Forum.
- **Sociocracy 3.0.** The procedural decision-making layer that Tamera added alongside Forum after the 2021 reckoning. If you are bringing Forum into a group, you also need a decision-making method.
- **Bohm Dialogue.** The philosophical cousin to Forum. Different in form (no agenda, no facilitator-as-director, no decisions) but related in lineage.
### From the ToGather archive
Five interviews from [Tamera](/community/tamera), all conducted by Sharon Avraham:
- [**Sabine Lichtenfels**](/interview/695d9ee2f8fbd260831381e0) on the founding era of Forum. The 1978 Black Forest period, the master-slave game, the "Hospital of Sex" press scandal, and the leadership shadow.
- [**Bori (Barbara Kovatz)**](/interview/69679d7f7b6c253b7c649656) on Forum as a circle of trust: "This is the relief of the communitarian, or what we would call the public space."
- [**Joshua Gottenko**](/interview/69679e0dbb287c49bb10b855) on the Kido Forum and the 2021 reckoning. The young man walking the circle, and the moment Miki Kashtan said "Tamera is a low-trust environment."
- [**Uri Ayalon**](/interview/69679eb293c58a9d74cdec44) on Forum as home: "My friends at home used to punish me for not being able to keep a secret. When I experienced the Forum, I felt at home."
- [**Aida Shibli**](/interview/69679f304dc0c1c3df87288b) on what Forum cannot resolve about race, power, and structural separation: "When a group lives together without facing the systems that make separation, those systems enter the group again."