Sub-groups with undefined autonomy
A community grows into parts, and nobody says what the parts may decide — so each one improvises a constitution and discovers later they do not match.
What it looks like
- Sub-groups have formed and no document says what they may decide alone.
- Two parts of the community have different rules on the same question, discovered by accident.
- Nobody can say whether the main agreements bind a sub-group, or how one could differ.
- A decision made in one part turns out to commit the whole community.
Why it is hard to see
Because the sub-groups form for good reasons and work well.
A community reaches a size or a spread where doing everything together stops being sensible. Distance, or numbers, or simply that the people at one end share a set of daily concerns the people at the other end do not. So clusters form, meet on their own, and handle their own business — and this is exactly what a growing community should do. Meeting as forty about something that concerns eight is the failure they are correctly avoiding.
What nobody writes down is the boundary: what a sub-group may decide alone, whether the main agreements bind it, and how it could lawfully differ from them if it wanted to.
For a while the absence costs nothing, because the sub-groups make small decisions and everyone assumes the general rules still apply. Then three things happen, usually in this order.
Divergence by improvisation. Each part answers a question the main agreements never covered, sensibly and differently. Nobody has broken anything; the community simply now has two answers, and finds out when somebody moves between them.
A decision that escapes its container. A sub-group agrees something that turns out to commit the whole community — a shared cost, a precedent, an obligation. It had no way of knowing, because nothing said where its authority stopped.
And the constitutional question, arriving too late. Somebody eventually asks whether a sub-group may have its own rule on something. The honest answer is that nobody knows, and by then the sub-group has been running one for three years, so the question is no longer abstract — it is about whether to overturn something people have built their lives around.
What to check
Ask what a sub-group may decide without asking anybody. If the answer is a judgement rather than a document, this is running.
Take one rule from the main agreements and ask whether it binds every part. Then ask two people from different parts. Divergence shows up fast under that question and almost never under a general one.
Ask how a sub-group could get its own rule legitimately. Not whether it may — how. A community that has no answer has not forbidden it. It has left it to whoever acts.
If it is already happening
Map before you legislate. What has each part actually been deciding? The list is the useful artefact, and it is usually revealing: some of it is plainly local, some of it plainly is not, and the argument is about a much smaller set than anyone feared.
Write the three-way split. What the whole community decides, what a sub-group decides alone, and what a sub-group may vary if it chooses — the third being the one that gets forgotten and the one that prevents the next round of this.
Ratify what has already diverged, or end it, deliberately. Existing local rules should be looked at once and either adopted as legitimate variation or brought back into line. Leaving them in an undefined state is what produced the problem.
And name the floor. Whatever else varies, some things should not: the invariants, the exit rights, the conflict process. A sub-group that can vary the exit terms is a separate community sharing a driveway.
What prevents it
A stated subsidiarity rule: for each domain, whether it is decided centrally, locally, or locally within a stated range — plus a floor of things that may not vary. The same clarity a domain gives a circle, applied to a place rather than a function.
Sources & further reading
- 1 RCOS Core — Layer 0: Identity & Scope — scope declaration and invariants — the constraints that apply in the absence of a subsidiarity rule
- 2 Ostrom, E. — Governing the Commons (1990) — nested units for larger systems, the eighth design principle
- 3 Community governance — domains, and why one is only real when it carries a concrete limit
Written by EcoHubs members, with AI assistance for drafting and editing, and reviewed by a person before publication. Facts are checked against the sources listed; anything we could not verify is marked. How this is written
The specification
RCOS has no stress test for this one. It is a pattern we have seen and can describe, and the standard does not yet catalogue it — which is worth saying plainly rather than leaving as a gap somebody notices later.
Terms used here
- Domain
- The decisions a circle or role may make alone, and the limits it may not cross without asking.
- Circle
- A small team with a defined domain it may decide within, linked to the wider group in both directions.
- Agreements
- The written rules a community has consented to. Distinct from values: agreements say what happens, and what follows when it does not.
- Decision matrix
- A table mapping each kind of decision to who may make it, by what method, and within what limits.
These travel together
Failures are rarely alone. If this one is familiar, check the others from the same lesson before concluding you have found the whole problem.
- The emergency measure that stayed
Decided fast because it had to be, never reviewed, and now it is what the community does — with a precedent attached.
- A community that forgot why
The rule survives and the reason does not — so nobody can tell whether it still earns its place, or which version is even in force.
- Experiments with no way back
A trial that quietly became the arrangement — because nobody wrote down when it ended or what would count as it failing.
- Governance with no path to change it
The rules can no longer be changed, so people stop trying — and the community loses its members quietly instead of loudly.
- The invariant nobody protected
The founding principle everybody assumed was permanent — changeable, it turns out, by an ordinary majority on an ordinary evening.