These four words mean different things, and frequently call for different talents and skillsets used by different people. And yet, they seem to get used interchangeably, and lumped into one person&…
governance/community-roles.md at master · open-organization/governance
Open Organization project and community governance materials - open-organization/governance
Commoning as Relational Provisioning & Governance | David Bollier
This is the second section of an essay, "Relationalized Finance for Generative Living Systems and Bioregions," by David Bollier and Natasha Hulst. The remaining three sections of the essay will be published in the remaining days of this week. The full essay can be downloaded as a PDF here.
Social system
In sociology, a social system is the patterned network of relationships constituting a coherent whole that exist between individuals, groups, and institutions. It is the formal structure of role and status that can form in a small, stable group. An individual may belong to multiple social systems at once; examples of social systems include nuclear family units, communities, cities, nations, college campuses, religions, corporations, and industries. The organization and definition of groups within a social system depend on various shared properties such as location, socioeconomic status, race, religion, societal function, or other distinguishable features.
Working Group Formation: Polite Goshawk · Issue #14 · lexicon-community/governance
What is the objective? Explore the definition and reference implementation of Lexicon Lenses, a transformation of records from one type to another. This working group is expected to production docu...
TeamTopologies/Team-Topologies-Community-Materials
A list of materials relating to Team Topologies (articles, tools, canvases, etc.) generated by the community.
What is Developer Relations (and why should you care?) — Mary Thengvall - Community Builder
You've probably heard the term "Developer Relations," but what does this actually mean, and more importantly, why should you care? In this blogpost, I explain the difference between Advocates, Evangelists, and Avocados, as well as help you understand how to interact with this new
Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media
Decentralizing the governance of social computing systems to communities promises to empower them to make independent decisions, with nuance and in accordance with their values. Yet, communities do not govern in isolation. Many problems communities face are common, or move across their boundaries. We therefore propose designing for "inter-community governance:" mechanisms that support relationships and interactions between communities to coordinate on governance issues. Drawing from workshops with 24 individuals on decentralized, community-run social media, we present six challenges in designing for inter-community governance surfaced through ideas proposed in workshops. Together, these ideas come together as an ecosystem of resources, infrastructures, and tools that highlight three key principles for designing for inter-community governance: modularity, forkability, and polycentricity. We end with a discussion of how the ideas proposed in workshops might be implemented in future work aiming to support community governance in social computing systems broadly.
What is Communalism?
Murray Bookchin What is Communalism? The Democratic Dimension of Anarchism
On Relational Infrastructure
Exploring the role of relationships, trust and mutualistic approaches to change.
Sociocracy - basic concepts and principles
Brief overview of sociocracy: basic concepts and principles, history, its use in organizations, its limits and differences to voting, consensus and hierarchical forms of organizing.
The Organization of Government in Metropolitan Areas: A Theoretical Inquiry
Allusions to the “problem of metropolitan government” are often made in characterizing the difficulties supposed to arise because a metropolitan region is a legal non-entity. From this point of view, the people of a metropolitan region have no general instrumentality of government available to deal directly with the range of problems which they share in common. Rather there is a multiplicity of federal and state governmental agencies, counties, cities, and special districts that govern within a metropolitan region.This view assumes that the multiplicity of political units in a metropolitan area is essentially a pathological phenomenon. The diagnosis asserts that there are too many governments and not enough government. The symptoms are described as “duplication of functions” and “overlapping jurisdictions.” Autonomous units of government, acting in their own behalf, are considered incapable of resolving the diverse problems of the wider metropolitan community. The political topography of the metropolis is called a “crazy-quilt pattern” and its organization is said to be an “organized chaos.” The prescription is reorganization into larger units—to provide “a general metropolitan framework” for gathering up the various functions of government. A political system with a single dominant center for making decisions is viewed as the ideal model for the organization of metropolitan government. “Gargantua” is one name for it.
The Purpose of Protocols
Every open social protocol generates shared resources, but none has produced a governance framework adequate to those resources. So who fills that vacuum?
"Teams working across organizational boundaries, sharing structured data, and building on each other’s work with ease." I know it's called "adversarial interop", but it actually feels like "community interop", at least right now
Toni Schneider
Conference Takeaways I’m back from ATmosphereConf in Vancouver, and I'm processing what I saw and heard. The atproto developer community could not have been nicer and more welcoming. Here are some takeaways. ... toni.org/2026/04/03/conference-takeawa…
