Special circumstances

Community-wide

By necessity the more people you have in your community the less equity your community has. Meaning, its very easy for 10-20 people to discuss and decide things that are okay with everybody, for 75-100 its harder. There comes a time where adding more and more people in a community (and “scaling it”) smooths over all the differences of people to make them homogenous and thus easier to organize things (like states do with languages and national “identities”). The decisions are more and more abstracted away because there are too many people and that creates a division between people that do the work and people who are no longer doing work everyday, therefore losing focus on the people actually doing the work.

That is not unique to consensus or sociocracy of course and voting will not help here. Voting systems fix this problem poorly, by making all decisions into a binary yes/no and erasing any concerns or nuance around decisions.

This is said not to discourage community-wide decisions or role selection, but to instead urge the reader to use the community-wide cases consciously and with intention and to be wary of “growth” and “scaling” of their community. Instead consider a diverse ecosystem with many small communities all collaborating with each other without needing to grow or scale (see also the Permacomputing document and Digital Commons).

Decisions

Some decisions affect the whole community (all circles and people that are in the community spaces), a good example of that being the Code of Conduct or deciding to move the space (offline or not) somewhere else. In these cases the circle model is not only innefictive but also exclusionary. For these cases the decision making variant described in the following section can be used.

Considerations

Deciding in large groups is hard and comes with its own set of challenges. Specifically:

• Rounds can not be done and not everybody will get a chance to speak. It would take a disproportionate amount of time to do so and not be good for the participants. Instead the facilitator needs to find other ways to do a lot of the decision making steps asynchronously. Some examples include: post-it notes on the wall, a digital mind map or whiteboard, forms/questionnaires and comments in a forum.
• Not all steps can be done together as a group. Synthesizing a proposal for example would result in problematic power dynamics and long meetings that people wouldn’t be able to pay attention to.
• Because these decisions are taken by the wider community, with no membership and lesser access controls, there needs to be a way to filter the “noise” to reveal the opinions the community holds.

Decision making

[Exploration]

Exploration steps: Understanding the topic, Share considerations on the topic and Share ideas.

The exploration part of the decision making process can (and should) be done by the whole community synchronously or asynchronously in a any way the facilitator deems fit. The facilitator should leave adequate time for the community to read, ask questions, discuss and share ideas/perspectives on the topic. The timeline and the medium the exploration step will use is up to the facilitator.

It is infeasible to make sure that every single person in the community understood and contributed to the exploration step, both because there is no membership and because there may be too many people with different availability and desires. The goal of this step is for everybody that can and is interested in the proposal, to be given adequate time to deliberate and contribute. It is up to the facilitator to determine when that has been achieved and to make sure everybody is heard, otherwise take the necessary steps to achieve those goals.

[Synthesis] Proposal forming

Synthesizing the proposal can not be done with the whole community due to the reasons given in the considerations section. Instead a circle should take the responsibility to take all the feedback, ideas, considerations and concerns that were gathered and form a proposal (the circle that does this depends on the proposal at hand).

As noted in other sections in this document, the circle should try to integrate as many of the ideas as possible and it should make sure that it has all the feedback from the facilitator and the wider community. An effort should be made to balance people that may be affected by the decision more, may not have been heard as much or people that have less social privileges in the community. If the circle deems necessary to contact some person or group/community for additional input and feedback they are encouraged to do so.

[Feedback] Present the proposal, Clarifying Questions, Quick reactions round.

After the proposal has been synthesized the circle presents the proposal to the community. This can be done publishing the proposal in a public place (like a forum/chat or the entrance of the space), or presenting it in a community meeting. The community can ask questions and react to the proposal or give suggestions for improvement.

Depending on the feedback the circle receives it may alter the proposal and present it again (if there is too much negative feedback), or move the proposal to the next step and get everybody’s consent. Note that small corrections or changes that won’t change what the proposal is about should always be done in this step.

If the circle presents/publishes the proposal and there is a lot of negative feedback from the community, by either a large percentage or by people that are affected/less privileged in the community around the specific proposal, that is a message to the circle that it has failed to listen to the concerns and ideas of the community. Besides starting from scratch and crafting a new proposal, the circle should also do self-reflection on what wrong and what steps can be taken to fix it. The community has the right to know why the circle went wrong and what are the next steps being done to improve things in a transparent way.

Decision and implementation

When all the changes have been integrated to the proposal, the decision is taken with lazy consensus. If there are no serious concerns within a time frame given by the facilitator/circle then the proposal is considered to have consensus and it passes. The time frame should be long enough for people that have less time or less participation in the community.

Depending on what the proposal aims to do, the implementation can be done by the circle itself, the person that made the proposal, or the community-wide role selection process can be used further down this document. It may happen that the implementation part is not needed because the decision was taken for a new version of the Code of Conduct. It is up to each facilitator and/or circle to decide how the implementation should be done.

Quick decision making

Circle members sometimes have to make quick decisions without having the time to go through the decision making process described above.

If the situation is happening in a domain of an existing role, then the person that has the role can act on it, since they are already trusted by the circle to act autonomously in that specific area. There may be cases though when a person doesn’t have a role entrusting them to act. For these cases the circle should prepare proactively with guidance and agreements on what to do (these could be in the form of RFCs).

The agreements should specify (at a minimum):

• a scale of urgency for each specific event (for example dangerous situations, sexual harrassement, police involved, time limit imposed by another entity (for funding or cooperation for example), etc)
• what are the minimum number of members that need to be present at each scale of urgency
• what are the limits of power the members have in each scale of urgency
• how is a quick decision reversed or changed later if needed
• how long should the sub-group wait for a reply before considering the person absent

The circle should keep track of who is available and when, so that it is clear who is available for a quick decision making session or not. This information should be available in the group in an easy to understand and up to date format so that quick decisions can be made timely without always waiting for responses.

In these time-constrained situations not the whole decision making process is followed. Instead the circle either immediately decides on a proposal (if somebody has already an idea for next steps) or synthesizes a proposal and decide what to do next. If time permits the circle can wait for people to respond that are not present or seek feedback on the proposal from people affected or other circles.

Making quick decisions like this requires a great amount of trust and familiarity with each other’s needs. The more circle members know each other (needs, reactions, beliefs, etc.) and the more they see each other as human beings, the easier and faster making quick decisions (and any other decisions) becomes. Building this kind of mutual understanding means that its clearer why each person talks the way they do, what do they mean between the lines and what are their hopes and fears. When the circle decides or forms a proposal people should anticipate each other needs and shift the proposal so that it fits everyones needs, including potentially people that are not present in the meeting.

Note that if urgent decisions are coming up often in the group, then consider that maybe a role needs to be created to empower a person to make decisions or decide on a guideline (can be an RFC) on how to handle specific cases without a group meeting every time.