Agreements
The written rules a community has consented to. Distinct from values: agreements say what happens, and what follows when it does not.
Governance terms only mean something once they are written into agreements with a named process. Ask a community to show you the paragraph — and the last time it was reviewed. If a group can describe the feeling but not point to the text, treat this as an intention rather than a working system.
Agreements are the written rules a community has consented to and can point at. Not aspirations, not a statement of values — the specific, checkable text that says who decides what, what each member owes, and what happens when somebody does not deliver it.
The distinction from values is the one that matters. “We value transparency” is a value. “Minutes are published within three days, and any member may see the accounts on request” is an agreement. The first cannot be broken, only disappointed. The second can be broken, which is exactly what makes it useful: a group can notice, name it, and do something.
What a working set covers
Communities differ enormously in what they share, but the agreements that keep appearing in the ones that last are unglamorous and procedural: how a decision is made and by whom, what money each person owes and when, how a person joins, how a person leaves and what they take with them, and what happens when an agreement is broken.
That last one is the most commonly missing. A rule with no stated consequence is a preference, and everybody learns which is which within about a year.
An example
The clearest test is the one to apply on a visit: ask to read the agreements, and ask when they were last reviewed. A community that can hand you a current document has a working system. One that describes the feeling but cannot find the text has an intention — which is not worthless, but it is not the same thing, and it will not help when two members disagree about what was decided in 2019.
Sources & further reading
- 1 RCOS Core — Layer 2: Governance & Decision Logic — how agreements are specified and reviewed
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
Related terms
A decision passes when no one has a reasoned, paramount objection. Not the same as everyone thinking it is the best idea.
A decision method requiring the agreement of all participants. Powerful for trust, slow under scale and fatigue.
In consensus, an objection serious enough to stop a proposal. Healthy systems define narrowly who may block and on what grounds.