2 of 3: What are representatives anyways? "Who are we?" (i.e. who are the Community Council members?)

Community Governance Constitution
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Here’s the second of my three governance posts. This one tackles the question: “what did we elect Councilpeople to do?”

In July 2021, I created a slide deck of the types of action that candidates said or wrote in their candidate statements that they would do if elected:

  • Representing — speaking personally for a specific sector, such as geography or other identity.
    Sounds like: “I will represent X (for example: ReGOSH, AfricaOSH)”
  • Judging — deciding for the community on complex topics.
    Sounds like: “I will decide on X (for example: the logo)”
  • Listening — helping the entire community tackle complex topics.
    Sounds like: “I will find out what the community knows, wants, or is concerned about X (for example, the boundaries of membership, drafting or changing a Constitution)”
  • Coordinating — helping GOSH’s do-ocracy be more functional.
    Sounds like: “I will improve hand-offs between Working Groups”

It is likely that opinions vary widely on the question “what did we elect Councilpeople to do?” I hope that parsing out these types of action will help us talk to each other about what we want for GOSH governance. And it already has: in discussion with Pen earlier today, he put into words what the Councilpeople have primarily been doing since being elected in 2021:

  • Providing a skill set — managing projects, executing tasks.

Not to say that the first set of four types of action don’t also require skills, but rather that the first year of the Council has been dedicated to rolling out Sloan Fdn funded programs.

What do you think?

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Adding notes on “how representatives represent” from Jane Mansbridge, who notes that:

in a 1774 speech, Edmund_Burke parsed out the distinction between representatives who did as they were instructed by their constituents (later called “delegates”) and representatives who followed their “mature judgement” and “enlightened conscience” (later called “trustees”).

Mansbridge has helpful stuff in the first 35 pages of her book Beyond Adversarial Democracy that I found to be super relevant for communities like us here in GOSH. She walks through group processes known as “unitary democracy” vs voting which creates losers known as “adversary democracy”. This is relevant to us because we sometimes use open discussion-based group process like to run our in-person gatherings or our writing projects, and sometimes use secret ballot voting for coming for electing representatives.

When GOSH formalized a body to make governance decisions on behalf of the whole, we followed a pattern observed by Mansbridge in interest-based communities of choosing to add an “adversarial” decision-making mode (such as secret ballot) because either the size of the group has grown to exceed synchronous formats or because complex issues are testing the limits of a unitary approach.

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