I'm very pleased to introduce Ted Rao and Alex Rodriguez, who are coming to us from Sociocracy for All and speaking on the topic of who decides who decides, recursivity in grammars of governance. And, they're building here on a lot of work and thinking around, organizational design and and governance and structure. I've been learning a lot from from both of them for for years now. And so I'm really grateful for the chance to, to, you know, to bring, what they've been working on to this space. Ted and Alex, take it away.

Thank you. So the weeds was looking at, okay, this is what we this is what we looked at. And the question was back to that very simple question, right, of what would it have to look like so that it would work for us? So we tried that. We're like, okay. So culture I don't know. There's a there's values admission that one needs for sociocracy, but then, wait, there's consent that we didn't really I mean, I think that there used to be consent, actually, on the in a previous version, but whatever. So we would go, okay. Whatever. Let's just say it's it's a version of what is called tier lazy consensus. And then it gets already a little tricky because none of these processes are really what we do. So we're we're, like, we're a little stumped. I I speaking for myself, I was a little stumped in the beginning. I was like, wait. This seems so close, and yet I don't even I don't even know what to click. And then we talked about that for quite a bit, Alex and I. And I think in the beginning, I was even confused what I was confused about and why it it didn't fit. And it took me a long time to realize that recursion was the thing that was missing because I having kind of my first governance language, so speak, besides the one that we all speak, right, and kind of democracy and all the ones, sociocracy is built on recursion. It's like one of the it's one of the design principles that is never really talked about, but it is kind of just obvious there. So just taken for granted. So I couldn't I could not undo that in my brain, but it didn't fit this. So let me show you. Then so we're gonna go to nitty gritty to more abstract here. And the nitty gritty was okay. So if I did something that is very similar to community role, then it would have to look more or less like this. So there are the overarching statements, mission, aim, mission being more like a border statement of why you have your organization, and then a concrete description of what you do. And then additional things, and they're dotted here because they're optional. You can like, from a governance perspective, from organizational governance, from my point of view, you can even you don't even need those, but goods might be good to have. And then here's some like, these are the kind of the core pieces. The rest is bells and whistles. But the core piece is and so we try to basically zoom into how would it have what would it have to look like for sociocracy and then generalize it from there. Right? Because it's too hard, at least, for my brain to think about it in general, but going from the example and seeing, like, okay. How much can we extrapolate here of what and maybe see whether it would also work for others. So instead of just having a decision making method and decision making bodies, what we need is we need different kinds of decisions. So what we have here is they're kind of operational decisions, and then they're more policy general decisions and how we elect people and how we change our governance and maybe budget decisions and whatever else. So what are the buckets of decisions that we need? And then how are they decided? And I'll show you in a moment, the other slides are about kind of walking through concrete organizations of what that would look like. And then instead of just saying the council makes the decisions in a distributed decision making system, there are different groups making different decisions. Right? And the way that's conceptualized in sociocracy is that every every decision making body has a domain, and in that domain, they make decisions. That so it honestly doesn't even work to even write them down because they change all the time. That's the recursive and the fluid piece because sociopathy determines how to define and change and pass on a domain. And I'll talk more about that, but that will come later. So but what we were what I was thinking or what we were thinking then is, okay, at the very least, to kind of get ourselves started, one could kind of do it like that, and then would have one would have to draw lines. That's how I was thinking. Actually, we can already look at it. Like, in a sociocratic version, most of the things are decided by consent, and then operational decisions are by delegation, so to speak. And then this the assignment here, it's fairly clean because there is a clear bias. Of course, it was invented for sociocracy and then extrapolated. I want to own that. So this would be a sociocratic version of what it would look like when it's filled out. And then as I said, bells and whistles, which I don't find that interesting to talk about here right now.

Well, yeah. That's one way of saying it. Yes. The thing is that yes. Just strictly seen as a decision making method, yes. I think that your description is kind of getting the gist of it. Yes. That so it's consent means there's no objection. So not everybody needs to agree, but everybody needs to say, yeah. Fine. There's nothing wrong with this. However, one thing is that consent and that's where that already where it gets a little slippery, honestly, because you can't it's hard these interdependent pieces. Right? So the who decides what and how do we decide? It's the interdependence of that that is so mind boggling, at least for me. So consent like, speaking with my consultant hat and my trainer hat, my answer would now be, yeah, but you can't really make consent decisions in large groups because you don't have the quality of listening that you need for that. So you need small groups, which goes down to you can only con use consent if you also have a way of re keeping group sizes small. So that's where it all gets tangled up again. Alex, do you have something you wanna say right now? You kind of look like it now. Okay. So let's see. Then I was a little I was this is also a little cath cathartic for me. I used an organization that drives me insane that is not so Socratic and was like, okay. Let's see how they would fare in the system. And, basically, it's a board run and ED run organization, just a classic nonprofit. You don't even you shouldn't even know who it is. Let's not go there. I'm on the board there. And so they basically solve everything with voting, but sometimes the ED just decides, and it's absolutely unclear when is what. Nobody knows, and that's, of course, an invitation for tension. And then so I was having all kinds of I don't even know. I'm on the board, and I've looked at the governance, and some of these things I simply don't know. Nobody knows what that is, like, like, who makes actually which decisions and so on. It's all a little bit of a mess, which is, I would say, very common for nonprofits like that. That that issue that it's kind of board run, but kind of ED run. It's just everywhere. So should we grab one now? Actually, it's all to me, it's just all just leading up to to what we really want to talk about. So you're welcome to look at the slides, but it's more for the impression. Let's see. Then I just looked at just so that you see it, again, something basically a replicated version of what I showed you first of what sociocracy would look like. This is now just filled out for concrete organization, which is our organization, like, also, you know, defining all the other things like conflict resolution and so on. So the biggest piece, and that's that recursion piece, is that whenever we have a mat like, a matrix where we sit together and we say, okay. Let's distribute our decision making. Let's make sure that there's some, like, name whatever you wanna name here, but where we have different decision making bodies and we decide what they decide, and then we have a distributed governance system. That's great. That's, of course, better than a hierarchical system, and it's still static because, basically, to change the matrix that you drew together, often what happens is that everybody comes together in some sort of general assembly kind of thing or some kind of delegation system or whatever. We have some form of group together that we feel has the legitimacy to design this matrix and attribute, like yeah. Design I guess, attribute power in places or designate power somewhere. But it's the right word here. I'm struggling to say the right word. But right. So in order to let's say there is something that this membership or this this council can decide. Okay. Let's say there's a given domain, whatever, x. That is part of what the council decides. If now we realize that it would be way smarter for some other group to decide that very thing, then we would then who's gonna decide that? Would we call the same group together again or its counterpart? Right? Like, who basically, in order to just make one change, we're already in this lack of clarity of, like, oh, now what? Or do we hand over to the board, and the board now manages that? Like, what is the mechanism? So whatever it is, it's often undiff undecided from what I see in the field, and that has a very static nature to it. What happens in in a recursive model is that in a way, the way I think about it is there is the overall domain of everything, everything that can possibly be decided. There's kind of a a a, like, a seed in the beginning. And then there is a mechanism by which domains can be passed on, and that's the only thing that's defined. And then from then on, it's in the direct relationship, for example. So now if you see here everything that can be decided, Kanafya. And then let's say this organization decides to have four decision making bodies that receive in the direct agreement with this one, receive a part of the domain, and now they are the decision makers on this domain. And in this model, it would they would have to be the final decision makers on this. So on, let's say, membership matters, these people decide not anybody on the board anymore. They decide, and then they can decide to take parts of that, chunk it out, and give it to somebody in a subcircle, like, to a different group of people. And, again, it is basically so let's see. It's hard to compare those two systems because it's hard to draw. We were struggling with how to draw it even, and that's a sign that it's kind of hard to compare in that we only need a mechanism of how that happens. And then the matrix that that comes into existence changes all the time, but it doesn't change because somebody has the master list, but it changes because it's a direct relationship between subcircles and their parent circles. Alex, do you want to say anything right now? Am I missing anything?

Yeah. So now you can imagine if you think back to the original community rule. With that in mind, I'm just stumped of how to, like, wait, but I don't want to say what the process is of making a decision on this one. I want to say how it's done in general, and then I just want the whole thing to run. I don't want to have to do this. The frame has to be set up in a different way to figure that out. So that was our main struggle. Now I'm curious. I think I just wanna kind of say the things that I want to say and then then then stop. So take note of what you're thinking right now because I do want to hear it, but let me just get it all out. So what's two things that are important to me on that one that are somewhat related, but a little bit on the periphery? So we see in sociocracy fraud. Sociocracy, I don't know if that's clear to everybody. Sociocracy is old. It was invented in the late nineteen seventies, not by us. We're just steward of it, the stewards of it. That's how we see ourselves. So sociocracy fraud, the nonprofit, we call it like a movement support organization. We're not the movement, but we're supporting the movement with whatever we do. Because, ultimately, of course, in a self governed, self managed situation, any organization needs to own their own governance system. Right? If you can't trademark a governance system from my point of view, at least not a self governance system, that to me is just completely against the the the value set that is underlying it. So but that means an organization that is truly self governed and not just self managed would need to be able to change its constitution fairly easily, right, without getting two thirds of all members into the room, like something fairly fairly simple. For example, in my organization, in our organization, the circle for all, the mission circle, a group of seven people can change the the governance agreement by consent. So it's just another domain in the hands of one of the circles. It's just another of those packages, one of those packages that you can say, okay. You're now the final decision makers on everything governance. That's a big and important one, but it's also just another domain. So that's different from a situation where we have a constitution that is immutable, basically, or that the owner puts in place and says, you know, all equals under the constitution, but I you know, the that is at the mercy of the person who's putting it in. In a socratic kind of in a purest socratic system, it's the collective that gives itself that and and then distributes it so that it can be changed. Anyway, so that for me also, goes to overall what I said that governance systems can't be changed, but that, of course, in this system, a lot of people need to have enough governance literacy to even be able to own their system, to understand what what works, how. And, of course, they need to evolve over time. Two more slides. So this one is just that's going back to linguistics and, you know, there's so much recursion in linguistics, of course, because that's one of the strengths of our human language brains to build recursive things and basic rules. Now the question that is driving me is what are the what are the building blocks of that governance? Like, what is maybe it's represented in our brains fairly similar to language, actually. And whether that is the case or not, it doesn't really matter to wonder what the building blocks are and what are the constraints, and maybe they're somewhat universal. Maybe all the governance systems kind of run on a meta language that we simply haven't asked about. And then what I want to do around so coming back now from that very abstract view, basically, the question for me is if we know if we want to know what the building blocks are. Let's say we find out. Let's say we know governance needs all of those different things, and these are the building blocks of how it's built. Then governance could be a little bit more like something like that, like these pick your protein kind of menus where you so in this case, I I chose this because just imagine we could have a governance system. We would say, okay. What you need is you need a decision making method, and you need to way define domains. You also need some sort of whatever. You need to know who's where who can change your governance system. Like, you would know all those parts. I don't know them yet, but I want to know them really badly. And then one could have a governance rule kind of generate a governance agreement generator that would look a little bit like this. I started doing exactly that of saying, like, okay. So what's the bare minimum in this case for role based consent based governance systems, like sociocracy, holiocracy, and so on, where one explains that says, okay. This is the very basic thing that you need for it to even work, like the basic DNA. And then there are some things that you can decide, and they would add a little flavor to it or they would add just another functionality or something that is more tailored to the context. But I do believe that there's some basic mechanism that is underlying things. And this is just one particular problem when consent can't be reached. But for each of the sections in my document that I took this from, there is this forking off a basis basic thing. I'm gonna start and let Alex talk if he wants to.

Okay. Well, we've got a a lot of good ideas in here, already. I wanna make, make sure we start from the

top.

See. Seth, do you I think you have the first, the first question question. Do you wanna get us started?

Can I just do a comment back real quick?

Yeah. Of course.

question of, I'm aware of the approach. I'm aware of it, and it's just, for me, a matter of time to really sit down and read the book and understand how it compares because I have a feeling that there that there might that I might be that I might know the the connecting piece. And I think and so I've been working on, kind of from a different direction. No. That's not even true. From that same direction, but more on a set theoretical approach. So then, basically, domains such as set of allowed actions that then you can build subsets under. So there might be there might be actually, we might actually go closer than we think is what I'm saying.

You know, for what it's worth, one kind of candidate option for thinking about community rule has been to essentially veer it into institutional grammar. So use it as a kind of interface for for institutional grammar. The the question, you know, that that confronts me about that is, you know, what is does that framework gain you enough that it's worth the kind of the kind of back end task of of implementing it. You know, does doing the back end standard compliance, you know, give you enough that that it it's worth whatever constraints are inevitably part of it? My my hope is that and, you know, maybe this connects to the set concept is that it could facilitate the composability of of the of the rules. And, you know, one of the real design goals ultimately was something like community role or, you know, or the things that might inspire are around around trying to bridge the gap between the design of of interfaces that are, that are friendly for users to to, to employ and then, computational tools that implement governance practices in in their communities. So, you know, the kind of typical one is from community role to policy kit within if we're talking within the the kind of tool tool set in in, in Medica. But, you know, I'm I'm curious if you have thoughts about how this this recursivity thing plays on tooling and and and how important or not important kind of infrastructural ingredients are. You know, I kept kept thinking about the as you were talking about recursivity, the the concept that I've been, using a lot lately, from Christopher Kelty, anthropologist, of Recursive Publics, which he used to talk about open source communities that are kind of exist to produce the technical infrastructure that is the basis of their community. And yeah, so I'm I'm curious if you could say a bit about the role of infrastructure and and and the kind of technological apparatus that is is or isn't useful in in, you know, in facilitating this stuff.

Alex, if you want to say something, you're welcome to. But I I'm yes. Go ahead.

Yeah. For me, thank you. That helped me sort my thoughts a little. I guess I'm noticing when when it comes to tools, I notice very much in myself that that the teacher in me wants to go, like, no. People shouldn't use tools. They should just understand it, you know, and then then it doesn't matter what they use. Like but I also know that there are places where we hit our our limits of what you can do just by understanding it. Because in Societe for All, everybody is fully trained. You know? That is a luxury kind of situation that you have nowhere else on this planet. Okay? You don't have an organization where 200 people have been have been trained to this level. So that's a great lab where I can say, oh, if everybody just understood it better. So the issues that we have, I know, are because of lack of of certain things. And I agree, for example, Slack, you know, is a good example for information flow needs to completely change of how you like, because they have a many to many information flow. Right? Many circles talking to many members. And so how does so that needs tooling that is designed the the the way let's say, the model that I have in my mind of how it should work, but I'm not as much of a tools person, is like hormones in the body. Right? A lot of different parts sending out signals and a lot of different parts receiving signals on a certain topic. Right? So, basically, like, a glorified tagging version of a forum kind of a thing. You know? That's what we're trying to make work, but people don't take to it so well. And I'm like, this is what's needed. So, anyway, something like that. So information flow is big. Simple things like nesting the information. Like, every circle will have its policies, but then some of those policies are relevant beyond that circle. So how does that trickle up? How do things trickle up, trickle down? What needs to trickle up, trickle down? There's so much to think about there. Budgets are really hard to make in this way. And then simple tooling just to go back to what we've talked about would be for me that would be kind of taking the place of community role would be the thing that I talked about of of, oh, just click that, and I want, you know, and I want this way of doing this and that and this way. And then I hear a button at the end, and it gives me basically a rudimentary governance agreement that somewhat works. That would be fantastic. That's not so hard to do.

And and that you know, as I said in the chat earlier, that reminds me a lot of the open social compact project that we heard about, the last seminar, I believe, which which is you know, it's it comes out of, like, the compute contributor covenant experience. And contributor covenant was actually the first project I knew of that used community rule to post its its rule to GitHub. So so they, you know, they they've used it, and then now their new project is, is a much more structured approach, much less like, here's an open space, go play, or even fork this thing and play around with it. It's much more, here are the buckets that you need to fill, and and here are the options of things that you can fill it with. And and I I think that's, you know, I I think that's a really promising approach, and and that kind of structure is important. I I also think in turn you know, I think a lot too, Alex, about that distinction between between skills and tools. And I also, you know, increasingly thinking about tools as teachers. You know? You know, we have this this in our media archaeology lab here, we have a bookshelf of old manuals for our software. Right? And so much of the you know, we don't get manuals with our software anymore. So it's a really powerful space, and it's a reminder that, you know, part of it is that we've gotten better at building tools that teach. Right? And and it reminds me of a story that the Loomio folks told me years ago, about, like, a group of kids in a classroom who use Loomio, you know, together online. And then in their classroom, they started using similar processes, and they called it Roomio, you know, which is just such a wonderful you know, it's an example of how a tool can teach people. And, you know, part of the argument I'm working on in my book is that, you know, our tools have been teaching us, like, really bad lessons about self governance, and they've been, you know, teaching us against it. And, so so so in some way, maybe that's a way to break the paradox to think about tools as teachers. Blaine, you had a a thought to bring up. Do you wanna give a give voice to it?

Oh, I was just I guess I was just echoing what Seth was saying is

well, yeah, I guess this

is partially curiosity. Right? I think I'm not I'm not super aware of socioxy. I think I I read some whole accuracy stuff years ago, but they're you know, it doesn't seem like that it's not exactly the same. But just, yeah, how or just this general tension between Between because I guess, Okay, the way I think about these governance questions for me, one of the motivating. Questions or things that I've I've had as a priority is how do you build something that scales arbitrarily, right? That kind of doesn't degrade as it increases in size. But it seems like, you know, a lot of people say, well, no, it's it. The whole point is you need to build systems that compose well where you have lots of small units that don't need to scale, but that can interact with other small units, right? The circle idea and sociocracy, right? So I don't know. I guess just in general, it's it's all these tensions of, you know, like Seth put it as, you know, async versus nonlocal, right, global, that's kind of thing. It's the same. It's all these dimensions of scaling. Right? Scaling across time, scaling across space. Then I don't know. I guess just I'm I'm curious just what your thoughts are on all of this.

Yeah. And

Yeah. I guess the word that's coming to mind here that I feel like yeah. We're it's subsidiarity, right, of, like Mhmm. However over decisions is made as close to the decisions themselves. Or and so I guess, like, sociocracy is this idea of of what is it? It's, like, fluid fluid subsidiarity, right, where that's always kind of going on, but it can move around as it needs to. Okay. Cool.

Okay. Okay. So I guess probably maybe to so you're you're kinda saying that system makes it so that it does scale and that that kind of these these async problems kind of yeah. Everything gets scoped. Okay. Cool. Alright. Awesome. Okay. I'm done.

Well, with that, we might, we might about all be done. We're just about at time. Thank you for an awesome conversation and and presentation. As as usual, we, like to thank our presenters with a bit of live applause. So please, prepare yourselves to unmute, in three, two, one.

Excellent.

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