Here are some thoughts on how I see the mission of this Team …
1. About the Team
In my view this Team actually consists of two different sub-Teams:
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Goverance: these are the sociocracy experts who will be able to provide advice on processes in The Reef (description of subsequent steps to do certain things).
=> Example: the process in the Governance document to get a proposal adopted.
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Working Methods: these are the collaborative organisation hackers who will come up with solutions for things that don’t go as efficiently as they could go.
=> Example: the item in the Working Methods document to use tingsha bells to get meetings back on track if needed.
For now we mostly need to develop the Governance aspects, so in this post I will focus only on that.
2. Deliverables in the short term
Even if this Team’s deliverables may be a little less urgent, their importance should not be underestimated.
The most visible one that I foresee is the finalisation of the Teams’ structure / the organigram. For this we would need to find an answer to the following questions:
- Do we stick with the current Team structure, or do we want to make changes?
- Can we make a clear description of what Teams can decide autonomously?
- How can we set up a General Circle / Coordination Group in a way that makes sense?
- Do we go for double-linking from the Teams to the Coordination Group? If not, what other mechanisms can we put in place to achieve the same outcome?
- Will we do evaluations and performance reviews? If yes, how will we go about this? Do we need to revise Section 5 in the Governance document (on accountability)?
If I could make a wish, at some point I would like to reach the profiiency level of Heartwood Cohousing, where they made a rather detailed description of which Teams do what (see the list of links on the right).
Another small task that would be good if it could be taken up is to define a process for decisions that are taken by written consent.
3. More permanent tasks
For Team Governance I see the following permanent tasks:
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Taking responsibility for the Governance document, which is a bit like The Reef’s constitution. Tasks include ensuring consistency and making proposals to fix things that don’t work.
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Making sure that The Reef sticks to sociocracy (or other tools that ensure equivalence and efficiency). Tasks could include making a proposal to select Facilitators, Leaders, a Secretary etc on a regular basis.
- Taking responsibility for keeping the decision log up-to-date?
4. Learning more
The Reef’s Governance document (internal link - public link) is probably a good thing to keep on your radar.
There are several ways to learn more about sociocracy:
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“Many voices one song” - Jerry Koch-Gonzalez and Ted Rau (See the “Books and manuals” folder on Nextcloud (or welcome to borrow my copies)) => it’s a substantive books, but it has a lot of pictures, and it’s easy to skip some sections if you are not interested.
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Webinar on sociocracy in cohousings: it has an interesting section at some point about how one cohousing regularly updated its organigram.
- The SoFA training on facilitation that I followed recently (which is also a crash course on sociocracy) => see Nextcloud > Learning, … > Training courses
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SoFA Web page that links to other pages that summarise key concepts
- SoFA Overview of the trainings they offer
- The Sociocracy 3.0 manual (die-hards only) => see Nextcloud > Learning, … > Books and manuals
Question / idea: how would you feel about launching a sort of study group together with the people of Team Facilitation (if interested)? We could for example set up 4 online meetings and talk about one chapter of “Many voices one song” in every session?
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