Minimum Viable Organisations

Please note this is a work in progress!

Basic principle: It should be easy (low emotional labour, low technical labour, zero cost) to start a project with a small group of people with shared goals.

The further groups that want to produce things get from this, the more likely they are to fail.

So why do they fail? Some general observation from my time in over a dozen groups over the last 20 years:

• Lack of care of people in the group
  • Put on your seatbelt before helping others principle. Often I see people who are trying to make a change in the world before ensuring that everyone in their own group is fed, housed, supported, etc. Supporting our direct (i.e. 1st level) connections should be the first principle of organising. People often get into this world due to trauma and we need to talk about that directly.
  • Not paying attention to burnout. People come and go all the time but if people are leaving and noone is checking up on them it’s both violating the above principle and not giving warning of potential problems in the group dynamic.
  • Only paying lip service to being trans, PoC, neurodivergent friendly, etc. This is very hard work but also about the most prefigurative thing you can do. We need to be proactive about understanding and exploring difference as a direct principle of the above two.
  • Protestant work ethic. The work should be fun, sustainable, rewarding, etc. It should also pay, if possible. Often groups can be derailed by “no true scotsman” types. We are all tired and trying and need to feel welcome and included.
  • Lack of encouragement of people to follow their interests. Groups often being led by the most outspoken, confident, etc. This can be good as it creates inspiration for others but can also crowd out quieter or less experienced people from putting ideas forward. Spaces should feel nurturing and diversity of tactics should be encouraged. “Yes, and…”
• Over-reliance on attendance at organising meetings as a prerequisite for being in the group
  • Signoff at meetings ends up as de facto signoff for anyone wanting to do something, wheras it should be a facilitation space
  • Synchronous attendance via Zoom or IRL inherently excludes masses of people who are otherwise very interested in anarchist ideas
  • When meetings are where decisions have to be signed off, they are often incredibly dull and get in the way of people getting to know each other, make friends, etc. Meetings should feel joyful to be in or they are inherantly unsustainable.
• As groups grow in numbers, making any kind of decision becomes more and more difficult
  • Larger groups stifle innovation as often the people wanting to just get on and make things are not interested in sitting through long process meetings
  • One or two people end up leading all the initiatives / projects and other people feel unable to join in or start their own.
  • Groups that grow above about 8 end up with a self appointed “middle management” of people who don’t really contribute but just critique the people doing things. These people often have similar roles in their professional life e.g. being managers at work, academics, or just other activists who’ve been around a long time but are currently not running their own project.
  • In general, the larger groups get the more they end up reproducing oppressive management structures.
  • Successful groups attract attention and more people wanting to be involved but we don’t really have a culture of encouraging people to form their own groups, splitting groups up, improving cooperation across groups, etc. Smaller groups give more people more autonomy.
• Trying to fix every problem / having too broad a remit
  • Capitalist mindset makes people end up trying to take on far, far too ambitious projects from the get go. You can’t set up a city-wide project with 3 people on no money and we should discourage people from trying. Can you start with a project that does one thing really well in one very local place?
    • Doing this encourages other people to set up sister projects doing the same thing rather than territorialising entire cities or regions
    • Doing this reduces the stakes and makes organising less stressful
    • Doing this encourages interaction with other hyperlocal organising, rather than continuing to organise along siloed “community of interest” lines
  • Lack of understanding of group life cycles, funding and burnout
  • Wanting things to be something they’re not, or can’t be
  • Wanting to have a broader impact but being unwilling to compromise on methods
• Poor record keeping and attention to process
  • Lack of transparency about how to join and leave, what the expectations on people in the space are, what commitment is needed, what to do if something bad happens, etc
  • Meetings without minutes are just conversations, and mean you frequently end up revisiting the same topics over and over with seemingly no resolution.
  • Meetings without action points assigned to individuals are somewhere between podcasts and group therapy. Both totally fine things in their own right.
  • Meetings that don’t review progress on action points are simultaneously saying they don’t care about the labour taken on on behalf of the group, and don’t care about the worker doing it.
  • If there are no proper minutes then it’s impossible for people who don’t attend to keep abreast of group decisions and progress.
  • If noone has the energy to take minutes, do you really have the energy to run a group?
• Misunderstanding and misuse of consensus processes
  • Consensus is a long process that can take weeks or months or even years to establish. A key thing to understand is that consensus is only needed for decisions that affect the whole group: usually this is changes in constitution or putting out official publications with the group’s name on. This is a tiny percentage of total decisions a group makes!
  • Bullying or coercing people into accepting decisions they are not happy with — “groupthink”. Consensus is often presented as the only ethical decision making process, or ironically, forced on groups of especially younger activists without their understanding or active consent.
    • The justification for this is often that decisions are seen as taking too long or people reach decision fatigue. If this is the case, then consensus isn’t working for you. Ask if really everyone needs to consent, if you can make fewer decisions, or if you can form a sub-group that can get it done without needing full group assent.

What a system that works should allow §

• People to contribute an hour a month if that’s all the time they have and not go to any meetings
• It should be easy to catch up on what the group has discussed and decided through reading documentation of meetings and projects.
  • It should also be entirely possible to not engage with this at all and just enjoy the space
• It should be easy to join, and leave, and for active and dormant members to be easily identified
  • Consensus decisions should only involve active members
  • Group membership isn’t a lifetime appointment, it should be contingent on ongoing engagement
  • It should be easy to join (or rejoin) and transparent how to do so
  • It should be easy to leave
• Work should be appreciated and celebrated
  • People with specialist skills should feel appreciated rather than having to fight to justify the value of their labour
  • Everyone contributing labour should feel like they are celebrated rather than critiqued
  • People should be encouraged to try new things and explore their interests
• Individual autonomy and diversity of tactics should be encouraged over groupthink (i.e. the group should be an enabler not a gatekeeper)

What I propose §

We should make it easier to set up and automate all the following.

A minimum viable constitution §

NB: this was written for my primary group, Geeks for Social Change, who have a discord you can join! Aiming to add more examples if there’s interest in this piece.

An agreed group definition of what the space is for.

For example: GFSC is a community, mostly based on Discord, that is there to support people to pursue their own projects in alignment with our values (which are articulated elsewhere).

Principles and code of conduct of being in that space

For example: Colleen’s draft + forthcoming code of conduct + server rules

A minimum commitment required for membership, and a definition of active and passive members.

For example: each member who wishes to be part of the active organising group contributes a minimum 90 minutes a month. This could be organising a social, taking notes or chairing an organising meeting, developing a project, doing some code, etc. Members who do not contribute for two months are removed from the ‘active’ list.

A process whereby active members can change any of the above

For example: “three musketeers” voting for day-to-day decisions, consensus on a limited subset of things that transform or change the group.

A minimum viable social structure §

A primary social forum for people to make friends and create organic collaborations and allow prospective members to get a “soft entry” into the group

For example: a discord/slack/email list, IRL non-meeting meetup.

A regular, non-mandatory organising meeting for the decisions that affect the whole group

For example: our monthly/6-weekly collective meetings

A mechanism for people to put forward project ideas with clear steps for involvement and an offer for the infrastructure the space offers.

For example: “projects” and “community” section of GFSC discord.

A way for concerns and complaints to be taken seriously

For example: the moderation process on our discord