Hi ! I don’t have very much experience with the Fediverse’s organisational practices, but I have some experience in co-operatives so I thought I’d just post some things I’ve picked up here and maybe they will be useful to you
This article by Richard Bartlett we found very useful in Code-Operative: 11 Practical Steps Towards Healthy Power Dynamics at Work | by Richard D. Bartlett | The Tuning Fork | Medium. I like that the post here meets well with “Break the power taboo”. In the past I’ve found that some of the organisations I’ve been in have pretended that power doesn’t exist and this can be quite damaging, it just masks where the power is (“we’re non-hierarchical, so everyone’s equal”)
I read an interesting paper about centralisation on Mastodon: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10081553/1/arxiv.pdf. I think it’s relevant because it shows how central power can develop for instances (e.g. because they’re popular) or for groups of people (e.g. if the most powerful instances are in the West). In co-ops power normally resides with the people that founded it, and with the people who contribute most. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it can be - for example I think this is one of the things which worries people about Twitter threatening to get involved on Mastodon (“embrace, extend, extinguish”)
I’ve seen a lot about Sociocracy recently and my experience of it so far in CoTech has been positive. The main innovations which I personally like:
- it delegates responsibility to “circles” without allowing them to hold power over others or become a caste of their own
- it replaces consensus (“all 20,000 of us agree that this is exactly what we want”. “Actually I don’t for any arbitrary reason… proposal blocks”) and voting (which often over-simplifies issues and encourages conflicts… “EU, yes or no?”), with consent (“all 20,000 of us agree that we can live with this” “Actually I don’t and I have a valid reason to withdraw my consent”)
- through the system of “rounds” it is good at making sure everyone’s voices are heard
- in my experience voting is sometimes necessary
There’s a London-based co-operative called Outlandish provides sociocracy training and has been doing it online throughout the pandemic. They did some for us and it’s been positive. If you like the sound of this I can put you in touch with someone
In terms of structure I think that “sharing the ownership” generally means using a co-operative model. That basically means that all members have 1 share each, equal voting rights and can’t acquire more shares than other members, but structure (“who is a member?”) and policy are fairly open-ended