I’ve been reflecting over the past few days about how amazingly unusual it is that for most of my life I’ve been a participant and member of groups that operate within large-scale distributed, anti-dominance systems of governance.
Wow, that’s a mouthful.
I’m feeling like the fish who someone asked, how’s the water? And all of a sudden I’m like holy moly, I am totally wet!
I grew up in the unprogrammed version of Quakerism, found healing in a program for families and friends of alcoholics, and generally have gravitated to groups that hold space rather than impose order.
I’m looking at these different [floundering for the right word- it’s not organizations or communities but it’s in that direction] structures? and realizing there is certainly a pattern, a blueprint if you will, for how humans can successfully come together and find meaning, camaraderie, connection, support, trust, a shared sense of purpose.
The orientation towards anti-dominance underlies the success of these communities.
Stay tuned for a deeper dive into each group/community. Here are the commonalities I see repeating over and over:
- Trustbuilding with bounded open sharing. A space where people speak and are witnessed without dialogue or helping. A place to learn empathetic listening and keeping in one’s own experience.
- A focus on individual choice and responsibility. Everything is voluntary and each person’s perspective seen within their own experience. There are common themes and recommended practices but not ‘rules.’
- Fellowship or more informal kinds of connection that take place outside the “official” time held by the group.
- Autonomous smaller groups within the overall organization. Each group has its own norms and decisions through unity-focused, knowledge-based decision-making. However, there are constraints that govern whether such a group is considered to be part of the larger organization.
- Leaderlessness at the group level, though work is done by rotating volunteers to support logistics, communication, collection and allocation of resources. These volunteers are known to the group and typically go through some kind of vetting or training process though it can be very informal (voting by acclimation, being paired with a prior volunteer, etc.)
- Wide ranges of opportunities to volunteer in the group and beyond-the-group with different levels of commitment or experience needed. Even at the individual group level, there is typically no need for any particular person to be present in order for a meeting to happen.
- Delegate-based governance at beyond-the-group levels, where the delegates meet more infrequently and do not make decisions for the groups, rather they act as conduits between the individual groups and the collective-of-groups at large. They do make decisions about their respective layer of the organization, such as allocation of resources, outreach efforts, organizing events and fundraising. These business meetings are typically open to all members even if they are not designated delegates or position-holders.
- Trusted committees that are temporary or have rotating-membership to complete projects- these may exist at any layer of the collective/organization.
- A collective of collectives at the broadest level, which serves to implement decisions by delegates, keeps track of and communicates resource allocation, creates and disseminates general materials and literature based on the collective purpose and intentions of members in aggregate (the unifying purpose). The service of this kind of body only becomes necessary with bottom-up growth, i.e. there are more groups with delegates than can comfortably participate in decision-making. For the most part, these are regional but in global communities that function online, this might be structured differently.
With these components in mind, it’s quite interesting to consider how we might build tools that support various aspects of the community. I’ve seen a number of technologies specific to governance, but I think the more interesting part is the trust-building and fellowship, which currently takes place online with tools that are not designed for the purpose.
Spoiler alert! I think we can use a broader understanding of the way these communities function to inform what kinds of online containers might serve them more effectively.