Circle
A small team with a defined domain it may decide within, linked to the wider group in both directions.
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.
A circle is a small team that owns a defined area of the community’s work and may decide within it. Kitchen, land, finance, membership — each gets a boundary, and inside that boundary the circle decides without returning to a general meeting.
The word is doing more work than “committee”. A committee usually recommends; a circle decides. That difference is the whole reason sociocracy scales where a single all-hands meeting does not.
What makes it a circle rather than a working group
A domain. Written down, and specific enough to be checkable: what this circle may decide, what it may spend, and what it must bring back.
An aim. What the circle exists to achieve, so that objections can be tested against something.
Two links to the wider group. One person chosen by the parent circle and one chosen by the circle itself sit in both. Information and authority travel upward as well as down, which is what separates this from a hierarchy that has been redrawn as circles.
Decisions by consent within the domain.
Drop the domain and you have a committee. Drop the double link and you have a delegation structure with nicer diagrams.
An example
The failure to watch for is a circle that has an aim but no spending authority. It meets, it plans, and every plan goes to the general meeting anyway — so the group has added a layer without removing any load, and the circle’s members quietly stop attending. If forming a circle has not made the general meeting shorter, the domain was probably never real.
Sources & further reading
- 1 RCOS Core — Layer 2: Governance & Decision Logic — domains and delegation, specified
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 governance system organising a group into linked circles, each with its own domain, deciding by consent.
A decision passes when no one has a reasoned, paramount objection. Not the same as everyone thinking it is the best idea.
The written rules a community has consented to. Distinct from values: agreements say what happens, and what follows when it does not.