Editing New World Alliance (section)

=== Structure and process ===
[[File:15th Street Financial District.jpg|thumb |upright=0.9 |right |alt=Stately looking buildings on a downtown street |The Alliance's national office was two blocks from the [[White House]], in the light brown building midway down the row of buildings here.{{refn|According to journalist Ted Cox, the address was 733 Fifteenth Street N.W., Washington, D.C.<ref name=Cox />  The address is given in Wikimedia's description of this photograph; to read it, click on the photo and then scroll down.  The description identifies 733 as the sixth building from the right, and viewers should note that three narrow buildings to its immediate left are difficult to distinguish from one another.  The entire stretch of buildings constitutes part of what is now known as the [[Financial Historic District (Washington, D.C.)|Financial Historic District]].|group=nb}}]]

The Governing Council met semi-annually.<ref name=Marilyn>Marilyn Ferguson, "Foreword," in Mark Satin, ''New Options for America: The Second American Experiment Has Begun'', The Press at California State University, Fresno, 1991, p.&nbsp;xiii.  {{ISBN|978-0-8093-1794-3}}.</ref>  There was also a Coordinating Committee,<ref name=Olson /> and a national office was established two blocks from the [[White House]] in Washington, D.C.<ref name=Cox />

But one of the Alliance's expressed goals was "a politics of participation,"<ref name=Real /> and the GC chose not to run the Alliance from the top down.  The authors of the book ''Networking'' describe the organization as "nonhierarchically structured" and say decisions were made by decentralized committees.<ref name=Lipnack />

There were also local chapters.  Belden Paulson, a political scientist at [[University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee]], says that in the early years the Alliance had "a kind of missionary zeal" to establish local chapters across the U.S.  He reports that 50 people turned up at the initial chapter meeting in Milwaukee and that the group met for several years.<ref name=Paulson />

The Alliance's processes emphasized consensus and even meditation.  An encyclopedia from [[Gale (publisher)|Gale Research]] reports that the Alliance expressed a "commitment to consensus building in all our groups and projects."<ref name=Newsletter>Melton et al., ''Encyclopedia'', p.&nbsp;324 (quoting the Alliance's newsletter).</ref> It also reports that Alliance chapters and projects claimed to use "short periods of silence [in order] to draw on our intuition in making decisions and solving conflicts."<ref name=Newsletter />