I have a cousin who lived in Findhorn. She said it was a fantastic place but was not very child friendly. To be anything that endures, unless a safe and nurturing environment is not developed for the youngest members of the community, the notion of an evolved autonomous community is likely to always lose its breeding participants.

The other big issue at Findhorn was that egos often cause interpersonal issues that tend to run off all but the most committed members. To me,I think the best possible way to create community is to establish pods of small sustainable homes with a central meeting place that has resources that all within the pod can benefit from in a barter type system that everyone in the pod can agree on. Money can still be used by those with that resource but to live within the community, to help avoid ego manipulation, each person in the community would be allowed the same square feet of space and all would have access to the same amount (consensus agreed value) of food, water, heat, cooling, etc... It is still vulnerable to ego but if a group of people can establish a value for each type of effort or money and a top limit is set for how many resources any person can receive from the community resources then perhaps those with less than huge egos could live in community with one another?

Just floating some ideas out there...