Organisations using Sociocracy asynchronously - do they exist?

This is an extension to a question that came up as part of the SoLT course:

Are there any examples of organisations that practice sociocracy in an asynchronous way?

Specifically, I’m talking about organisations that use tech solutions to adapt sociocracy’s methods to a digital-first approach. That’s a bit of a fluffy description of what I’m imagining but the best way that I can describe it is to provide analogies to “digital-first” ways of working. For example: rather than a document review in person/on a call, you would leave comments on a shared, online document; rather than a short daily meeting to check in, members of the team would post their update to a shared space when their day starts; rather than a kick off meeting for a new project, a document proposing the project would be opened for comments ahead of time.

They’re mostly problems that globally distributed teams have, where the people are not necessarily available at the same time but work in the same (digital) space; they rely on the technology to tie their threads of communication together and pick them up at a time that suits them instead of synchronising their actions to be at a meeting.

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Hey there
Yes, I think there’s quite a bit of movement around that. I know for example murmur (a spin-off out of The Ready) that is made for policy-making without meetings. And of course, there are many other tech tools to support self-management work and project-management.
And of course there’s the whole DAO space, one could say that’s digital first!

I personally am sometimes a bit sceptical of technology instead of decision-making, and I think we all have to learn still how and when to use tech, and when not to use tech. But I trust that will happen over the years, trial and error :smiley:

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