Governance website content

Governance website content

Landing page/ homepage:

Welcome the the Embassy Governance Toolbox.
We are an intentional community of 14 people in San Francisco. Our aim is to .. [fill in pls]
Part of that is thinking critically about the different ways to run a community. With that in view we have run a series of investigations into the different ways that communities can run themselves. We have documented the structures, the process, the costs and benefits of each one. We have run salons and discussions along side, we have collected data through all of this and these our out findings. We hope that you and your communities will find this useful in figuring out what suits you and we’d love to hear about how you have ventured into these territories yourselves.

Before we continue let us tell you a little about who we were before this ‘experiment’. We have been a community for just under two years, we are a mixture of people interested in a variety of things but working towards a common goal. When we first started the community we experimented with different structures. For a while we tried democracy. It was hard. We iterated. We initially help weekly house meetings, where all but nought was discussed around a table: where should we get our food? what about if people don’t drink alcohol, or meat? how well and so on and so forth. Until we realised that these meetings were preventing us from the very goal which brought us together - to live more efficiently, less wastefully, in order that we all have more time and energy to devote to improving the state of things. And so the quick evolution to the do-ocracy began. And it worked well for the most part. During this time, things worked, people came, people left, structures and hierarchies changed and importantly, our community did not have house meetings. We abhorred a house meeting. For the duration of this experiment however, we held weekly house meetings, not enforced but strongly encouraged, and for the first time in a long time, we were coming to together to meet and discuss with excitement and enthusiasm. We re-enagaged in a way that we hadn’t for a long time, which may be linked to a feeling of empowerment, the possibility that under a new system you role or influence in the community might be refined. Suffice to say, this unsteady meander through governance systems inspired us all. And that is worth noting straight off the bat.

Subpages

Governance structure 1: The Do-ocracy

We have operated under some loose form of a do-ocracy for the last year and a half. However for the purposes of this blog, we re-instigated an evolved form of the embassy do-ocracy in order that we have something more formal to present here. And so to the do-ocracy..

The structure: Do-ocracy, Embassy SF style

• To us, do-ocracy means if you’d like to see something happen, then take action with transparency and communication
• Communication means letting people know it’s happening, and giving them a chance to give feedback before taking action
• Transparency means doing so in a way that others could get involved or participate if they wanted.
• The threshold of taking action is reversibility. Only take unilateral action if you are happy or comfortable with others reversing your decision
• Leave no negative externalities: finish what you start. Leaving things unfinished increases the chance of negative feedback, do-ocratic reversal (see above), and peoples’ willingness to entertain future proposals.

Practical Steps to a healthy do-ocracy

1. Clearly communicate
   1. What is the issue that needs addressing: ‘Our bins are terrible!’
   2. What do you propose to do about it: ‘I’m going to buy more bins and replace the old ones’
   3. That you welcome constructive feedback ‘if there’s anything I haven’t thought about I’d be happy to hear from you’
   4. That you welcome help ‘if anyone wants to help let’s meet at x time and place!’
2. Meet or chat with people, accept their help, listen to their opinions
3. Do it. Get the job done, finish it and leave no trace :)

Benefits
1. This system provides flexibility for communities that have residents that with wildly different levels of availability. By not forcing involvement from those that are unable or unwilling the do-ocracy allows those to can, to do. Incentivises action rather than inaction: it’s vital to provide positive feedback of good deeds as well as constructive negative feedback of actions taken.
2. The do-ocracy works to incentivize action in some circumstances in a way that democracy wouldn’t.
3. Minimal time is required to make a decision and unlike democracy for example, it works to minimise bureaucracy. For example if you are someone who doesn’t care in the slightest about problem x, you don’t have to have anything to do with the discussion around problem x.
4. Communicating and enrolling people increases their likelihood of celebrating you.

Costs
1. Do-ocracy without communication becomes “Tyranny of the proactive”.
2. Those who act, can end up receiving a disproportionate level of criticism. Relatedly, by incentivizing doing, do-ers take on more risk and by not doing anything you take no real social risk.
3. Do-er fatigue: this system can result in a situation where the majority of the work in the house is done by a handful of individuals. How do we maintain the flexibility that do-ocracy afford us (point 1 above) but also work to spread the load to make it sustainable? Ultimately, the do-ocracy incentivizes doing, until the point of do-er fatigue: it works if the load shifts over time and it fails when certain individuals consistently fail to step up.
3. Conflicting/thrashing do-ers - when two active people do-ocractize something that opposes the actions of the other.
4. This system (like many others) is prone to people placing hurdles to progress.
- this includes non-constructive feedback that tends to hold projects up (I’ don’t really like the solution you have proposed to problem A),
- rhetorical questions that undermine the project itself (do we really even care about problem A?)
- offers of help from people that don’t actually have time that ends up holding things up
- people enforcing that their input help or advice be taken into account but not following through which ends up holding things up.
This can be solved by specifying a fixed amount of time (1 month, 2 weeks) to do as they wish and after than move the project on regardless (ask people with strong opinions to be involved). An alternative solution is to enforce that if an individual has a strong view that they must be involved in moving things forward in order to be heard.
5. The do-ocracy is vulnerable to becoming biased towards those with a) social capital and b) the practical information to get things done. i.e. if you’re popular you can get away with almost anything!

Other issues
Finding ways of acknowledging the inevitable imbalance in the do-ocracy
Belated Feedback - what to do in the absence of feedback, or when feedback comes so late that you have already invested lots of time

• set a timeframe during which feedback is welcome and a specific time when the action will be taken in the absence of feedback e.g. ‘I’m going to out this thing in place in a week, please let me know if you have thoughts. If i hear nothing back I will do-ocratise it!’

Cool references: similar approaches, critiques and so on

• https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Do-ocracy
• http://www.communitywiki.org/cw/DoOcracy
• The Tyranny of Structurelessness http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/hist_texts/structurelessness.html

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Governance structure 2: The Wiki Governance system

Landing text: Six weeks after do-ocracy and of all the suggested governance structures, the house voted to move into a wiki based governance system. This was outlined as part of a wider discussion about governance structures for lunar settlements. One interesting thing that was immediate increase in involvement from the house following the change to the system. A significant proportion of this increased interest or empowerment, seemed not to be specific to the wiki based structure but simply to a change in the house decision making progress. Nonetheless, the increased involvement was a welcome event and certainly not to be sniffed at..

The structure: The Wiki Governance system
- This structure uses a discussion forum, such as a wiki, to air issues, propose solutions and discuss those solutions. We used Loomio for this but you could try any.
- All members of the community have access to the site in a non hierarchical manner apart from the one individual who manages the process.
- After a set period of time, the discussions are whittled down into a number of proposed solutions.
- three members from the community are then elected to go become experts on the topic, familiarise themselves with the discussion, the concerns raised and to ultimately vote (representative voting)

Practical steps to a healthy Wiki Governance system
- Proposals must follow a given template which specify certain fields. For example, the proposal ‘we should all pay less rent’ is impossible to vote on. However, a proposal that has specific goals, a timeframe, details of any estimated costs in time or money, and crucially, should the system be voted in, who will be responsible for putting that solution into place.
- Accountability - individuals needs to be held to thir actions should they be voted in.
- Use a uniform random distribution of voters so that you don’t resample from the whole group separately each time. This is especially important in a small group!

Benefits
People seems to accept decisions well, even if they were not in agreement with the outcome, as they were exposed to the process and felt that their voice had been heard, even if it had been over ruled.

Costs
Voter apathy

Extra things we could measure from this system:
* duration to make a decision
* number of people who gave input/commented
* frequency that decisions are disagreed with/overturned
* longevity of a decision/way of doing things (not possible with a time-limited system)

Salon notes

Governance structure 3: The Corporate Structure
Landing text: Four months in the experiment and we found ourselves all sat around the table discussing the plan for the next system. Whilst the house was largely expecting to go into a dictatorship for the next month, a few last minute suggestions came up at our governance meeting. At the last minute a corporate structure governance system was voted in, with a CEO, two board members (one internal and one external), three executives and all residents comprising the employees.

Practical steps to a healthy Corporate Governance system

• The responsibilities of an organization’s CEO or MD are set by the organization’s board of directors or other authority, depending on the organization’s legal structure. For us, the goals of the CEO, as with the other governance systems, was to maximise happiness, productivity and community.

• This system allowed the CEO to delegate tasks to the executives (Events, House Operations and Guest Ops), who were then able to delegate sub tasks onto the employees.

• Ask employees what tasks they felt able and willing to do before delegating! We learnt quickly that communication was key. Employees reported that they felt disempowered when they were simply given tasks to do, rather than asked which tasks they’d like to do. Many of the executives had not worked in a corporate environment before, where as many of the employees had.

• Sharing of logistical information which allows others to do their tasks. Not all employees knew how to do guest ops, or food ordering before they were delegated these tasks. Now they know and it will be easier for them to help out whatever governance structure is in place.

• Some employees lept to their new roles with previously unseen enthusiasm, there were some definite successes.

• Positive reinforcement makes for happier employees

Benefits

• The delegation of tasks revealed the imbalance in the workload in the house. People (employees) who had previously perhaps contributed less, were suddenly given tasks around the house. This meant that residents were made more aware of the different types of work and the extent of the work that it takes to keep a community running.
• Lack of consensus - efficiency, although this only held up when employees took care of their tasks

Downsides

• Bureaucracy - executives spent a lot of time communicating with employees in order to try and get jobs done, rather than just getting the jobs done themselves.
• Artificial imposed hierarchy - we found that people were unhappy with their roles and also did not respect the roles that others were given. Executives, whilst they felt empowered, resenting having to ‘boss around’ the
• Unhappy people - executives resented having delegate and holding all the responsibility, employees resented being told what to do and being held accountable for those things.
• Interestingly the hierarchy seems to change attitudes in the house, language in emails changed as the terms ‘fired’ and employee duties’ were banded about. A class system seemed to be emerging..

Governance Structure 4: Not entirely unlike Holocracy + bragging
Inspired by Holocracy but not Holocracy.
Some details:
- We’re in a modified Holocracy/Do-ocracy with issue areas and bragging
- House starts out with only $1000discretionarybudget(insteadof$2000) and we earn more by doing things for the House
- Volunteer for teams or make a new one!
- Vote on what you want our rewards to be: https://www.loomio.org/d/6aXHkER9/house-rewards
- When do you something for the House/community, tell us! What’s app or email what and how long it took.

Details:
- Volunteer for teams! Internal workings of teams is up to the team members. The House cares that things get done. You can be on more than one. Come up with weekly action items and get em done.
- Everything you do for the house (and time), you need to report or we don’t earn.
- Earn $1/minute/person

Teams:
Culinary Delights - Food
Residents’ Experience (include house maintenance and cleanliness)
Guests’ Experience
Event Coordination & Promotion
Marketing & PR (Brand Identity)
Internal and External Community Fostering
Team Cash Money (Finances)
Team Reaper (culling the flotsam and jetsam that washes upon our shores from waves of guests)

Want to do something not covered or more specific? Make a new team!