Synchrony: Software for doing Sociocracy

Synchrony

Software for doing Sociocracy

Derek Laventure (derek@consensus.enterprises)

Scott Zhu Reeves (scott@consensus.enterprises)

Land Back!

We are on lands that are traditional territory:

Anishinabewaki ᐊᓂᔑᓈᐯᐗᑭ
Haudenosaunee
Attiwonderonk
Wendake-Nionwentsïo
Mississaugas of the Credit

Respect and gratitude to the people who are past, present and future caretakers of this land.

https://whose.land & https://native-land.ca

(SCOTT)

Derek and I are two members of the Products Circle at Consensus Enterprises,

Along with Christopher Gervais, who’s been a key driver of the Synchrony project.

Consensus is a small team of web professionals

who envision a more just world

supported by an ethical, responsible, and inclusive IT industry.

Our Mission is to make open and responsible technology accessible to purpose-driven teams.

I also want to share that

We have had several for-profit social enterprises contact us to ask about how Sociocracy has worked for us,

and what kind of challenges we’ve faced… Especially in the tech industry.

We believe in the transformational power of Sociocracy, and advocate for it constantly.

Christopher recently presented on Sociocracy at a regional tech conference; about how we use it in agile project management with clients.

We’re always happy to share our experiences and insights into the for-profit use-case, so please reach out.

Sociocracy at Consensus

We adopted Sociocracy about 6 years ago.

We've worked with Ted and SoFA to deepen our understanding.

We've noticed the overhead of "doing" Sociocracy in practice.

Sociocracy Itches

Overhead: keeping track of minutes, decisions, circle members, etc.

Community tools: mostly cobbled together toolkits, nothing focused on Sociocracy.

Bespoke techniques: Over the years, we accumulated ways to automate various aspects.

Why Synchrony?

Synchrony "scratches our own itch"

We outgrew our prototype tools

Goal: streamline changes that arise regularly

(DEREK)

ITCH: In the Opensource world where we come from, there is an idiom that we “scratch our own itch”, meaning to solve the problem we’re most familiar with or feel the most “itchy” about.

Synchrony scratches our Sociocracy itches.

We outgrew our prototype implementations of the automated tools we wanted and needed at Consensus,

finding ourselves avoiding changes we knew were needed.

For example, a couple years into our Sociocracy journey,

we recognized some errors in our circle structure and Aims,

and it was difficult to correct those mistakes within our existing tools.

We couldn’t move aims between circles and keep them connected to the circle and aim they were delegated from.

But other things as well: We wouldn’t notice when a circle role expired, for example.

Synchrony’s initial design goals center around streamlining and easing the “itchiness” of these kinds of regular operations.

Let’s jump into the software and give you a taste of what that looks like so far.

Demo

Step 1 (SCOTT): Briefly show Synchrony circles page (0.5m)

Step 2 (SCOTT): Create a circle (2.5m without moving Aims but including re-parenting a circle) 3m with circle page walkthrough?

Step 3 (DEREK): Delegate an Aim to the new circle (1.5m)

(Derek) Narrative: The change of a Circle’s parent Scott just showed is

an example of one of our design goals for Synchrony in action

Which is to streamline regular changes to the org: role renewals, circle structure changes, etc.

Now Scott is going to go ahead and add an Aim to our new circle, delegated from the parent.

So we’ve incorporated our values and understanding of Sociocracy into the software

For example, unlike traditional software models, we wanted Synchrony to set a level playing field

Where everyone can do everything, and there’s no “admin” access per se

This requires safety: undo-ability. So we built archiving, revisions, making it hard to destroy information

As you can see here on Scott’s screen, if we wanted to remove an Aim in the system, we can Archive it, but we can’t delete it

Similarly, any changes we make are saved as a Revision, so we can track changes over time and revert or recover older versions if needed

Step 4 (DEREK): Roadmap allusions (2m)

That’s a quick view of the features we have today.

We are currently working on implementing Domains, once again trying to deeply understand the Sociocratic principle to imbue it into the software

From there, we’ll work on Meetings, Agendas, Proposals, and Decisions

Beyond that, we imagine the interface morphing to focus on the process of doing Sociocracy, rather than the administrative task of keeping it up

Decisions as an example: We envision Decisions being recorded automatically from Proposals Decisions can also have Terms applied, to remind us to review in 3 months Potentially a Decision to add a circle could create the Circle itself

We’re trying to model SoFA style Sociocracy fairly closely Let the software get out of the way and allow you to operate Sociocratically

(SCOTT TAKES OVER WITH CTA)