Feature request: Group constitutions

I believe that it should be possible for anyone forming a group to draft a constitution governing the group’s basic rules and clarifying its purpose, vision, or values. Some elements in the constitution should be tied to the actual machine code/settings of the group—e.g. the voting method for decisions, a waiting period between membership and first proposal, etc.

After formation, changes to either the text or code-tied rules would themselves require a vote, the thresholds for which would be defined in the constitution in a rule tied to the code (i.e. changes to the constitution should probably require higher thresholds than typical votes and should be handled by the code to avoid giving undue power to any member).

This would obviously require collaborative, democratic document-editing, which I believe you guys are already working on and which I can’t wait to see! It would be very cool for some proposals be presented as collaboratively edited documents where tweaks are themselves voted on. Would very much like to see Loomio employ a sort of fractal approach to process, where votes can take place within votes, within votes, with groups temporarily federating with other groups, hosting sub-coalitions (this already appears possible), etc.