Unincorporated area
An unincorporated community is one general term for a geographic area having a common social identity without municipal organization or official political designation (i.e., incorporation as a city or town). There are two main types of unincorporated communities:Due to differences in state laws regarding the incorporation of communities, there is a great variation in the distribution and nature of unincorporated areas. Unincorporated regions are essentially nonexistent in seven of the northeastern states. All of the land in New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island, and nearly all of the land in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Vermont, is part of an incorporated area of some type. In these areas, types (and official names) of local government entities can vary. In New England (which includes five of those eight states, plus the less fully incorporated state of Maine), local municipalities are known as towns or cities, and most towns are administered by a form of direct democracy, such as the open town meeting or representative town meeting. Larger towns in New England may be incorporated as cities, with some form of mayor-council government. In New Jersey multiple types exist as well, such as city, township, town, borough, or village, but these differences are in the structure of the legislative branches, not in the powers or functions of the entities themselves.
Inclusive management
The inclusion part of the idea is perhaps best encapsulated by the "50/50 rule", a term used by public managers in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to invoke a variety of meanings. Sometimes "50/50" means that process and outcome are equally important, in other words that the effects of a process on community building are as important as the task completion. Sometimes it means that ideally 50% of the people involved in a process have participated in prior, related processes and 50% are newcomers, such that each policy-making effort acknowledges past conversations or decisions yet remains open to new ideas that may alter the previous consensus. From the perspective of the 50/50 rule, things like process and outcome or task and community are not in a trade-off relationship, and indeed are not even separable. In this context, concluding that participation was done "for the sake of participation" rather than to effect the outcome would be a damning critique. Keeping process and outcome, newcomers and old-timers, and past and present in play are ways of creating connections across individuals, groups, interests, and issues. Tasks are accomplished, yet opportunities continue to be open for revising as well as for moving on to the other issues and tasks that emerge or are next in line. This sense of inclusion is part of an ongoing stream of issues and people involved in one process or concern rolling forward into another echoes theorizations of democracy and civic engagement as an ongoing inquiry and never-finished project.