ZEGG: Seven Values, Forum, and Sociocracy
Details
- Author: ZEGG (Zentrum für Experimentelle Gesellschaftsgestaltung)
- Category: Constitutions
- Published: 1991
- Source: ZEGG
- Source URL: https://www.zegg.de/en/about-us/community-learning-place
- Access: public
Description
The constitutional practice of ZEGG, a 37-acre community in Brandenburg, Germany, held together by seven values, the ZEGG Forum communication method, and a sociocratic decision structure.
Annotation
ZEGG's constitution is distributed across three layers: a set of seven values that define what the community is for, the ZEGG Forum (a structured group communication practice now licensed and taught worldwide) that handles relational tensions, and sociocracy that handles operational decisions. Worth reading paired with the Tamera entry: both communities share the Bauhütte founding lineage and diverged in the early 1990s into distinct constitutional patterns.
Full text
ZEGG (Zentrum für Experimentelle Gesellschaftsgestaltung, Center for Experimental Cultural Design) was founded in 1991 on a 37-acre site near Belzig in Brandenburg, Germany, after 13 years of preparation in the Bauhütte in West Germany. The Bauhütte was also where Dieter Duhm and Sabine Lichtenfels developed the early form of what became Tamera; the two communities share founding lineage and diverged in the early 1990s into distinct constitutional patterns.
Today ZEGG holds itself together through a three-layer constitutional practice.
The first layer is the seven values. Love is named as the highest, framed as universal love that accepts, forgives, and integrates what has gone before. The other six are published on the community's website and shape the language ZEGG uses about its purpose: deep social change toward a sustainable, holistic, and sex-positive culture.
The second layer is the ZEGG Forum, a structured group communication practice developed over decades of community life and now licensed and taught widely outside ZEGG. The Forum is the community's primary governance technology for handling relational tension. Members step into the center of a circle and speak from the position of whatever is alive in them; trained facilitators and the witnessing group help surface and process what is present. Many decisions that other communities would route through procedure flow through the Forum at ZEGG.
The third layer is sociocracy, which handles operational decisions: budgets, work allocation, project planning. Sociocracy provides the scaffolding for collective choice; the Forum provides the scaffolding for collective trust.
For a comparative researcher, ZEGG demonstrates a constitutional pattern that becomes more common in the later wave of European intentional communities: governance as method rather than as text. The values name the purpose, the Forum holds the relational layer, sociocracy handles the operational layer. There is no single document to download. The constitution is the practice, refined over more than three decades.
---
## Living examples and entry points for community builders
If your community is sitting with questions about how values, governance, and relational practice connect to each other, here is what others have done and where the door is.
ZEGG itself, in Bad Belzig, Brandenburg, is the clearest living example. 120 people have been running Forum practice and sociocratic governance side by side since 1991. The Seven Values are not a mission statement on a wall. They are the frame through which ZEGG interprets conflict, makes decisions, and structures its educational program for outside visitors.
Tamera, in southern Portugal, was co-founded by Dieter Duhm and others who came out of the same intellectual and political current as ZEGG. Tamera runs its own version of Forum and has developed what it calls the "Political Ashram" model, which treats relational transparency as inseparable from collective work. It is a distinct community with its own trajectory, but the family resemblance to ZEGG's framework is real and traceable.
Across German-speaking Europe, a loose network of communities has drawn on ZEGG's Forum training without adopting the full Seven Values framework. These tend to be smaller groups, some still forming, that found Forum practice useful as a conflict tool without necessarily taking on ZEGG's political analysis of pair bonding.
Findhorn, in Scotland, operates from a values-as-constitution model that has some structural similarities. The specific values are different, and the spiritual framework is distinct, but the underlying logic of making values the load-bearing element of governance is shared.
Communities already using sociocracy as a governance layer sometimes add Forum-style relational practice separately. Sociocracy handles decisions; Forum handles what comes up in the room that decisions cannot resolve. Some groups find they need both.
Where the door is:
- ZEGG runs an annual summer camp and Forum training weeks that are open to outside participants. This is the most direct entry point. You can experience Forum practice without committing to anything.
- The Seven Values are available on the ZEGG website. One concrete exercise: read them together as a group and ask, for each value, whether your community is actually practicing it or whether it is aspirational. That gap between stated and lived values is usually the most productive thing to look at.
- If you are drawn to sociocracy specifically, the governance literature is extensive and does not require any connection to ZEGG. Sociocracy 3.0 is free and well-documented. ZEGG's contribution is integrating it with a particular relational practice, not inventing the governance method.
One caution: ZEGG's Seven Values include an explicit critique of romantic exclusivity, which ZEGG treats as a political question about how power and jealousy operate in groups, not only a personal lifestyle question. This is not separable from how ZEGG uses the framework. Communities that want ZEGG's governance architecture without this dimension should know they are adapting something rather than adopting it. The Forum practice and the political analysis of pair bonding developed together, and ZEGG practitioners will tell you they are connected. That does not mean your community cannot draw selectively on the tools. It means you should be clear-eyed about what you are doing.