Cecile, welcome on the SoFA discussion Forum.
I’m glad you already graduated SoLT and that you are still interested to learn more about sociocracy. Indeed, I guess sociocracy is a continuous learning journey.
I also graduated SoLT. For me was an amazing in-depth sociocracy related experience and it helped me a lot to prepare for the SoFA Academy.
Best wishes from me!
Hello, this is an old thread, but I thought I’d introduce myself before I post a question. I’m David
How did you hear about sociocracy?
I believe I heard about it on Mastodon from Doug Belshaw. I’m interested in how people can cooperate for the common good and am especially interested in free and open source software. I also heard about Holocracy and microsolidarity at a similar time, so started learning about different ways that groups can organize.
What organizations do you belong to, and do they practice sociocracy?
I’m a husband and a father of two young boys, and I try to integrate some of the priniciples of sociocracy into how we relate together as a family. I work at a early-stage company (for-profit corporation) that makes scientific devices. I am applying skills from Many Voices One Song to how I manage the team I am a part of. However, I’m limited in what I can do because of the existing structure of the company. I’m interested in starting or joining a sociocratic peer-mentoring group. Ideally I’d like to work for a sociocraticly run business someday.
What aspects of sociocracy are particularly fun for you?
I love the balance between equivalence and effectiveness. I really think you need both for an organization to thrive. I also love that the organization is seen as a living organism with needs of its own.
What aspects of sociocracy do you struggle with?
I’m not sure how sociocratic organizations can handle people in the organization who knowingly or unknowingly abuse their power.
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Hey! Glad to hear Many Voices One Song seems useful.
SoFA is restarting some communities of practice soon. @thomas.kemps
As for people abusing their power, that’s a tricky one. That’s why it’s important to have many/all the pieces together - for example, term ends and consent-based selections so the person doesn’t stay in that role.
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I heard about Sociocracy at the first organizing meeting for the Vancouver Washington Tool Library. We had no idea what we were doing and someone mentioned Sociocracy. I didn’t get her name or contact info, and she hasn’t come back, but I read Who Decides Who Decides, introduced Sociocracy to the group and they (we) adopted it. We’re brand new, have a main circle and 3 sub-circles already, though none of them have met yet. The main circle decided by consent to use consent, and we’re figuring the rest out as we go. It’s all fun so far since we’re so new. No struggles yet, still too new.
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Hi everyone; my name is CJ (they/them). I came into sociocracy into a very peculiar route—through volunteering with a fandom community.
1. How did you hear about sociocracy?
I heard about it through an organization called BobaBoard, which is an alternative space for people in fandom (as in, fans of TV, manga, anime, books, etc.). Around the same time my work at the time, a very familial-type startup, started struggling with accountability and was trying out Holocracy.
2. What organizations do you belong to, and do they practice sociocracy?
BobaBoard actively practices sociocracy; I ended up leaving my work and founding a cooperative, Studio Terranova a video game studio, which actively practices sociocracy in Japan. In September, we just did a talk about power and shared power/responsibility at Design Matters Tokyo
3. What aspects of sociocracy are particularly fun for you?
Roles! My co-founder and I took some time out to clearly write down roles in our organization, try them for six months, and just last week we successfully swapped roles to almost entirely different people. I was really impressed with how much a little structure in roles can do to point people in a positive direction with agency.
I was previously the person who was the “rescuer” of the organization, so I’m so happy to see people feel like they have ownership over their roles.
4. What aspects of sociocracy do you struggle with?
Japanese culture is very hierarchical, although there are a few people who are cooperatives as well. There’s simply not a lot of education or experience around these systems, so dealing with 上下関係 (hierarchy) in our clients is very difficult while we ourselves are sociocratically run.
Looking forward to sharing experiences with you all.
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Hi all, happy to be the first in 2026 to introduce myself to SoFA people.
I’m Robbert Schep — an entrepreneurial concept designer, researcher, and builder of socio-technical systems. My work lives at the intersection of technology, culture, and collaborative governance.
Im here because im launching an experiment in socio-technological technology design (Smartup Zero) that has a lot of sociocratic elements. I want to get to know other experiments and people in this field and hopefully find participants for the experiment.
But most importantly im here to learn and grow and have some fun while we are at it.
I heard about sociocracy at University when we were learning about Gerard Endenburg and his work in the 80’. Im Dutch so he is kind of famous here (under a small group of people).
Im most interested in how sociocracy could be hardcoded in source code for organisation. I’ve done that for my own experiment. I’ve build an operating system like that.
the hard part is to find enough participants who want to use this very experimental system so i can validate my hypothese.
If you are interested please let me know! Im happy to demo and give presentations about it.
read more about me: Author/researcher - Timeline0
I sent this to a friend who might be interested.
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Thank you for that! I really appreciate it.
Hello!! I’m Henry Pratt, and I guess the best(ish) way to put it is that I am new, again, to SoFA. I’m looking forward to participating in these forums, and connecting and re-connecting with the many marvelous people who are part of the SoFA-verse.
- How did you hear about sociocracy?
Sociocracy was something mentioned to an environmental activist group I was a part of, by this sort of cosmic social media volunteer we had. He was utterly convinced, after maybe attending an intro session, or speaking with Ted or Jerry, that this was a transcendent social technology we should have at the heart of our organizing. And we just sort of took him at (a very expressive) face value, and arranged for a few of our members (including me) to participate in SoLT 13. I think there was also this sense that we knew we had so many different, deep, issues plaguing an organization where things sort of always moved at the ‘speed of trust’, and we didn’t know how to start thinking about that… without trying to solve everything all at once.
I do think there was immediate understanding that sociocracy was a practice that could genuinely live and grow alongside us, and wasn’t another recombinance of what we had already tried. From SoLT, we got so excited we pretty much immediately undertook a self-implementation.
- What organizations do you belong to, and do they practice sociocracy?
Lots of wonky niche political groups mostly, but I’m also still active in Extinction Rebellion NYC, my union Campaign Workers Guild (CWG), and Interintellect. Extinction Rebellion NYC has organized together practicing sociocracy for years, through many different structures and ways of introducing how we incorporate into our “organizational DNA.” We have, (I think), tried to further an awareness that we use it within other groups we collaborate with, and I recently Iearned that one member of our group tried an adoption at Brooklyn Zen.
Introducing elements of sociocracy was a shared ambition with a friend of mine at Cornel West’s Justice for All Party, and we later talked to some people in the Green Party US about how our experiences with that effort might be beneficial.
- What aspects of sociocracy are particularly fun for you?
In general, I just love that shared appreciation for iterativeness that comes through sociocratic participation. At first it feels inorganic to the culture you’ve come to associate with how you participate in urgency-driven spaces, but as you sort of unlearn your patterns and relearn them—I feel like that appreciation for what’s happening gets reflected in convex patterns of work elsewhere as people make space for more unordering, drafts, stages, and just, in general, get more intentional about noticing the growth of others over a project lifecycle.
- What aspects of sociocracy do you struggle with?
In a big picture way, sociocracy in distributed organizations, where we don’t get to share in all the small in-person interactions throughout the day, feels like it really calls attention to all the stuff we’re being too slow to intuitively grasp about each other. This just slows down the moments of intentionality that sociocracy encourages us to take.
It can also feel, when there is so much shifting within a sociocratic community, that our circles get identified with too strongly with different eras and moments of capacity. The documentation varies in accessibility and inference too much, and reflecting the tabula plena built environment of our setting, you always feel like each circle has a hold-over aesthetic that your current membership is just squatting in.
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