Sociocracy and the cooperation technology



Sociocracy and cooperation technology are two interconnected concepts that can enhance collaboration and decision-making within organizations.

Let’s explore how they relate to each other:

  1. Sociocracy:

Sociocracy, also known as dynamic governance, is a governance model that seeks to create inclusive and effective decision-making processes within organizations. It aims to distribute power and authority more equitably, encourage active participation, and foster consent-based decision-making.

Sociocracy promotes self-organization, transparency, and accountability to ensure the organization’s goals are achieved while respecting the needs and voices of all members.


  1. Cooperation Technology:

Cooperation technology refers to the tools and platforms that support and facilitate collaboration, communication, and decision-making within groups or organizations. These technologies can range from simple tools like shared calendars and project management software to more complex platforms that enable online deliberation, decision-making, and collective intelligence. Cooperation technology aims to streamline and enhance collaboration processes, improve transparency, and facilitate inclusive participation.


The relationship between sociocracy and cooperation technology is synergistic. Cooperation technology can provide practical solutions to support the implementation of sociocratic principles within organizations. Here are some examples:


a. Decision-Making Platforms:

Online platforms designed for consent-based decision-making, such as sociocratic consent apps, can help organizations implement sociocratic principles more effectively. These platforms provide a structured process for proposing, discussing, and reaching consent on decisions, ensuring that everyone’s input is considered and documented.

b. Collaborative Communication Tools:

Communication platforms like online forums, project management tools, and instant messaging applications facilitate transparent and inclusive communication within sociocratic organizations. These tools enable members to exchange information, collaborate on projects, and share updates, promoting transparency and accountability.

c. Feedback and Evaluation Tools:

Cooperation technology can offer tools for collecting feedback and evaluating the effectiveness of sociocratic practices. Surveys, feedback forms, and performance tracking systems can help organizations gather empirical data and assess the impact of sociocracy on various aspects, such as employee satisfaction, decision quality, and organizational performance.

d. Online Deliberation and Consent-Building Platforms:

In cases where organizations have geographically dispersed members, cooperation technology can provide online platforms for deliberation and consent-building. These platforms allow members to engage in discussions, share perspectives, and collectively develop solutions, overcoming geographical barriers and fostering a sense of participation and inclusivity.


By leveraging cooperation technology, organizations can enhance the implementation of sociocratic principles, improve collaboration, and create more efficient and inclusive decision-making processes.

However, it’s important to remember that technology should be employed thoughtfully and aligned with the organization’s specific needs and culture to ensure its effectiveness and avoid potential pitfalls.

If you would like to share your comments or personal reflections on this topic, please feel free to do so in a comment below. Thank you.

Best wishes.

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A higher seat at the table of an unjust system,
diversity among the ruling class,
is not progress, it is a bribe!
― Muirén Ní Sídach

This is what I describe as an Integral Cooperative Relationship Management and Decision Support System; durable yet adaptive, open, transparent, accountable cyber-physical infrastructure for co-operatively organized, sociocratically managed intentional communities with the egalitarian mission: “To Optimize Human Strengths ― Accommodate Human Limitations”.

Since the dawn of recorded history those with a lust for power and dominion over others have restricted shelter, food, water, healthcare, communications, access to Information, learning and expertise in combination with the ever popular favorite, restricted freedom of travel and freedom of association.

Controlling education is important to teaching people they are not oppressed at all. To be clear, one size fits all education, commodified, narrowly proscribed with an illusion of choice, incentivized by wealth, prestige, and class competition is not a flaw, but a deliberate feature of the system.

No one has ever been more predisposed to engage in personal or collective critical reflection nor been constitutionally more honest within a culture that for centuries has inarguably promoted a bizarrely contradictory myth of meritocracy and elite class privilege.

These prerequisites of a just society must be made foundational, democratized basic infrastructure accessible to all, and not status signals, the exclusive privilege of those deemed worthy.

Community as a prefigurative cooperative union of diverse cooperatives, economic democracy for social democracy, coordinating shared infrastructural, resources, non-profit community service missions, and for-profit, worker-owned and managed co-operative businesses.

Workers are allowed only the most brutal form of Social Darwinism’s unrestricted, extractive capitalism, illiberal, anti-democratic, monopolistic, while the Oligarch class and their generational accumulation of wealth enjoy a tax subsided perversion of Socialism paid for by the workers.

In a typical corporatocracy, basic utilities, communications, computational power, office space, education, training, travel, healthcare, housing, transportation, are considered as essential to the means of production, a cost of doing business that benefits shareholders.

The limiting factor of survival is not a capacity for brute violence but the ability to make sound decisions that depend on mental health and fitness. As a species that is hardwired with a predisposition for socialization, the health, fitness and practiced skills for co-operative problem-solving and decision-making cannot be a class privilege.

Within our community union, the aforementioned critical infrastructure is reinvented, repurposed as a value-oriented system for the radical reduction of constituents’ costs of living and doing business, to ensure equal opportunity for the wellbeing and prosperity of all as the first priority.

Think about how we have tax free religion’s paid vacations, but never paid time off to study and make informed choices at the ballot box, barely able to survive, frightened, physically, emotionally, mentally exhausted people have no energy or time to manage the affairs of family, much less, neighborhood or town.

Not so for those who join the military reserves, they are compensated for the disciplined study and practice of war, some on a weekly basis, yet with no fear of losing their jobs or opportunity for advancement.

We suggest the wiser investment is compensation for the disciplined study and practice of peace, the ensuring of mental health, the time and resources to engage in the management of community, reducing, if not eliminating the stressors leading to conflict and violence.

This extraordinary distributed executive power, requires an unambiguous, Intentional Common Sense, a lingua franca of reason to which the Indigenous Common Sense of each can appeal with confidence of equanimity. The science of our tradition serves this principle, a diverse suite of tools for modelling, testing, and decision-support based on sociocracy from an ecological perspective, the understanding of people in context.

Our democratized communications and computational technology will enable a collective situational awareness, coherent information and decision-making power closest to the point of application, to best serve community relationship and resource management, to optimize human strengths, accommodate human limitations.

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True … How could we change this dominant "power over ‘’ behaviour unless we form communities and organizations in a totally new paradigme, that of egalitarianism and authentic consent decision making to balance the power dynamics and make decisions that work for all (or for as many as possible).


Privileges are a form of “power over” and unfortunately, even in an organization that aims to be egalitarian, having individual incomes tends to turn into “power over” others as a strategy to amplify or at least maintain one’s income, preventing it from fostering the volunteer activity that could change the perception/ponder of the paid activity.


For many who have the opportunity but also the privilege of being paid, the “time goes by, income comes in” approach is enough until the collective intelligence of the privileged is exhausted, and the limitation of ideas and lack of flexibility becomes a stumbling block for the entire organization and for each individual member. When paid members make decisions, the decisions are influenced by the desire to maintain the paid status quo (maintain or increase the income of paid staff).


Progress depends on the capacity of those who hold the essential power to really share the power. In the absence of collective feedback, too often “shared power” becomes just an illusion of egalitarianism or cooperation.


Basically, having the same people who influence the decision in different essential departments (circles) no longer means the distribution of decision-making power, but only the sharing of decision-making power among several privileged people who will continually try to limit and diminish the influence of the unpaid staff (volunteers).


People who have incomes from the community / organization are already paid staff, even if they also act as volunteers in other rolles. If we do not have this aspect in mind, we will end up in the situation of losing the essence of sociocracy and limiting ourselves to a form without relevant content …


Of course, there are also exceptions but the overall trend is that paid staff just use volunteers not sharing too much decision-making power with them, so volunteers are still a minority in the essential decision-making processes that affect the entire community/organizations. What if for each paid staff member, at least a volunteer would also participate in the decision-making process?


There are people who would like to volunteer in doing some things, but this is not possible when paid staff prevents them from acting because that would endanger their status as paid staff and the income they make. Contrary to general expectations, paid staff do not necessarily contribute to the development and progress of an organization / community, but often brake or block progress to maintain a status quo. Or not? Then all kinds of crises appear: communication, financial well-being, issues of equity and equivalence, etc., many aspects being disrupted one after another…


p.s.

I recently was warned about posting “to much” in this discussion forum (too many posts and too often) and it was sugested that this could be a cause of many people turning away from the forum. Well, I didn’t think my post could cause this fenomenon. I guess people have a choice to stay or to leave, to sarch information that is relevant to them, to comment and share their own opinions wether they agree or not and so on. This is an unexpected a serious statment that my posts put in danger the “promoting [of] a healthy and inclusive environment for all members”. So, the forum will become more healthy and inclusive without my posts? Well, I hope at least I can make some comments here and there. Or not? “Too much” being not measurable, I will stop posting on this forum, waiting further clarifications on this matter. For now it seems that the solution for a healthy and inclusive environment depends on me posting no “so much” and no “so often”. Well, Making this comment, did I take from other people’s space of expression? Making another post will I take from other people oportunity to make their own posts and share their own ideas? I don’t think so, but, I don’t want to prevent the well-being of this forum, so …


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