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Citizen Infrastructure

The Commoning Standard

Most of what humanity knows about how to self-govern well — how to share power, run a meeting, resolve conflict, hold a group together over time — is scattered across disconnected fields and communities, each reinventing it in a silo. The Commoning Standard is an attempt to weave that scattered wisdom into a shared, open synthesis.

It’s convened by Round Sky Solutions, led by Cecile Green and Seth Frey (a UC Davis governance researcher and Metagov research director), and frames its goal plainly: to enable healthy self-organisation at scale by integrating the plurality of research and practice into open standards for effective “commoning.”

The core idea: self-governance as a literacy

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The animating conviction is that the skills of self-governance — leadership, facilitation, conflict resolution, stewardship — shouldn’t be reserved for the few people at the top of an organisation. They should be a universal literacy, taught to everyone, the way reading is. The argument runs by analogy to “herd immunity”: a community gets compounding benefits only when everyone has a basic level of these skills, not just a designated leader.

Hierarchy, on this view, is “training wheels” — easy, scalable, works on anyone. Genuinely sharing power among peers is harder, and only possible if you actually develop everyone’s capacity to lead. That’s the bet the Standard is making.

What it’s building

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The project treats the know-how of self-governance as itself a commons — something to be held and governed in common. Concretely it aims to:

  • synthesise scattered research and practice into an integrated, practical “operating system” for self-organisation (what they call orgware), usable offline and online;
  • publish that methodology openly while honouring each tradition’s sovereignty;
  • implement it through a coordinative platform; and
  • keep evolving it through use and further research.

It builds on more than a decade of work behind “Collab,” an ecology of power-sharing practices used in settings from coops to colleges to banks.

Why it matters here

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This is citizen infrastructure at the level of people, not tools: the claim that the bottleneck on better democracy isn’t a missing app but a missing literacy — and that the literacy can be named, taught, and shared. It connects to several ideas elsewhere on this wiki: the Power Matrix, cargo cult democracy, and technology’s place is education.

Sources

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