Social.coop governance scoping

Thank you for this post! I just wanted to further recommend sociocracy, I have been learning it over the past couple of years through the Sociocracy for All organization and have found it key in a number of different organizing groups.

It is a bit to pick up, if anyone is interested I would recommend the ["Who Decides Who Decides"](https://www.sociocracyforall.org/who-decides-who-decides/) book which is very short and gives a meeting-by-meeting overview of how to use it for a new group. I have used it basically as shown for a couple of groups to revamp the governance to sociocracy.

I don't have the capacity to be in an organizing group here, but if it's helpful I would be happy to chat Sociocracy with anyone. I am not an expert, but did take the "Sociocracy Leadership Training", a nine week program where we effectively acted as group sociocracy consultants for another group trying to adopt it, and would recommend that program to anyone who is interested!

I don't have specific opinions about our governance structure, but I do want to talk a little bit about the language used.

I feel like "Good enough for now, safe enough to try" and "Those who do, decide" are probably reasonable approaches to governance, but I'm less of a fan of people talking about "sociocracy" as a buzzword. Notwithstanding the widespread enthusiasm for sociocracy in our community, it makes me feel really unwelcome when people inevitably say that if you want to learn about sociocracy you need to [read a particular book / view video explainers on the official website / attend official trainings]. I think that we should adopt guiding principles that are easy for people to understand without needing to refer to outside literature in this way.

I would really prefer if advocates of sociocracy adopted specific descriptive language such as the short phrases that Kathe posted in the original post (thank you Kathe---people rarely seem to include short descriptions like this!), and try to avoid throwing around "sociocracy" as a buzzword. More generally, I think that we should strive to be flexible enough to pick and choose which aspects of a philosophy are useful for us without implying a need to adhere to all facets of the philosophy. I'm less interested in what does and doesn't qualify as sociocracy and more interested in talking about what works.

@Dynamic Ok now you have me wonder what was the better phrasing that I should pick back up! Can you speak more to this?

@Kathe TB

I think you're mostly ok. I really appreciate that you provided a sum-up of salient information in two short bullets.

What I don't like is a thing I've seen happen here on Loomio (and on Mastodon maybe once or twice) where someone mentions Sociocracy, and then people start chiming in with how amazing it is and comparing notes on what trainings they have done, and not really doing anything to bring in people who aren't already indoctrinated. The first time it happened I asked for folks to provide a concise explanation of what they were talking about and someone linked to video explainers on SociocracyForAll, and that felt pretty icky in a cultish kind of way.

Also, when we were first hashing out whether to form an Organizing Circle at all, the idea was framed as being a Sociocratic approach to governance, and someone chimed in to say they weren't comfortable with the idea and disputed that the idea was Sociocracy at all. I don't care whether it's Sociocracy or not; I care whether it's a good idea.

You individually haven't done anything wrong---your post is one of the best references to Sociocracy that I've seen on here!---I just wish that we collectively take more care in how we have these conversations.

@Dynamic I'll give my support for these ideas from a philosophical point-of-view: anyone who understands something well enough should be able to explain those ideas from their own perspective.

Not only that, but explaining an idea in order to teach it to new people is integral for learning and understanding the idea not just for the person being taught, but also for the person doing the teaching.

I feel like there are a lot of ways that culture and society lead people to take the easy way out of explaining complicated ideas by simply outsourcing that education (here, have an explainer), and this leads to a lot of people supporting ideas that they don't have a deep enough understanding of to pass on directly.

In summary, teaching directly is integral to maintaining knowledge, and it's up to us to decide to take on that responsibility.

Although I wasn't involved in the organizing discussion, I can vouch that sociocracy is based on principles that show up in many successful self-managed orgs, whether they use that terminology or not. Here is my best attempt at summarizing some of those principles as used by groups I have studied or worked with:

• Leaderful - There is no top-down hierarchical management structure. The people doing the work are the ones who decide what to do and how to do it, in collaboration with anyone affected by that work.

• Interlocking Teams ("circles") - People working together on a particular focus meet/communicate with each other in a small group. If the work of two teams is related, there is a liaison ("link") who is a member of both teams. In large groups, there may be teams made entirely of representatives from smaller teams to discuss high-level strategy, etc. (* there is some research suggesting this last part might be a bad idea)

• Separation of Meta - Discussions of meta topics like how to communicate, how to make decisions, etc. are intentional and separate from the work itself. This can mean both having a separate governance circle and having separate agenda items for governance within a team's own meetings.

A couple additional thoughts. The idea that "those who do, decide" can be a barrier to equity depending on how it is implemented. Do-ocracies can favor those with the most free time and the most access, which risks excluding workers, caretakers, rural internet users, etc., especially those from other marginalized groups. So it's important to account for that in the governance process.

I also second @Dynamic's concerns about using the language of sociocracy being a potential barrier to organizers, even if that's what's implemented in practice. It's important to simplify the onboarding process as much as possible (e.g., not reading an entire book) to make the process inclusive and focus on actually getting the work done.

I thought I would drop in the recap from our latest meeting here to keep folks updated on what we are talking about in the Organizing Circle and to invite continued comment and conversation.

We want to center the following values in our governance: transparency, engagement, equity, and simplicity.

^ taken from https://www.loomio.com/d/zI1q0w95/organizing-circle-meeting-2024-january-30-tuesday-1300utc/8

We had an excellent discussion around governance that were touched on at a several angles. Overall we identified a few main themes from the agenda items:

• What are the levels of social.coop member involvement and how do members move between?

  • The sortition process to select organizing circle was really interesting. What are the roles and responsibilities of different kinds of members in the group? How do new members know how to get involved? How do we ensure knowledge from experienced members is not lost?

• Who makes what decisions?

  • When is a decision common vote (direct decision) and when is it made by a subset of people (circle decision) or single person? Is the line strategic vs operational: where is this split if that's there? How do we make sure the 'right' people are informing/making the decision (ie expertise, equity, etc)?

• How is decision making communicated and integrated across multiple groups/individuals?

  • If a decision touches multiple circles, how do these circles collaborate/communicate? How do we make sure a topic doesn't get 'lost' between circles?

• How are decisions and processes recorded and reviewed?

  • There are several members filling critical roles for social.coop, how do we make sure they don't burn out and how do we build in redundancies? How do we integrate results from past discussions into current decisions? How do we review/revisit decisions to make sure they are updated?

^ (Taken from https://www.loomio.com/d/lHKSa7uA/organizing-circle-meeting-2024-13-february-tuesday-1300utc)

We are going to meet again in two weeks and use a Sage3 board to start brainstorming how to address these questions.

Are there additional considerations for the scope of a governance document that is not addressed here?

@Kathe TB

Looks to me like the Organizing Circle is being very thoughtful about this and asking good questions, and I really appreciate it.

Thank you for sharing these conversations as they have been happening. Two recent Loomio decisions were highlighted in the initial post. Would it be useful to write down what problems we encountered there? Perhaps being concrete about the problems/frictions will help clarify how we can improve our existing practices?

@Ed Summers edsu Yes I think that could be very useful! Thank you