Deliberation
A window after a proposal is published and before voting opens, during which nothing is counted yet.
Ask to read the last proposal a community decided, not a summary of it. A real one says what changes, who may decide it, and by when. Then ask what happened between voting closing and the decision taking effect. If the answer is "nothing", that can be exactly right — but it should be a choice the group made on purpose rather than one it arrived at by never asking.
Deliberation is the reading and discussion window between a proposal being published and voting opening. Nothing is counted during it. That is the entire point.
Most groups deliberate without naming it — the conversation over dinner, the thread that runs for a week, the meeting where everyone talks it through. Naming it as a phase does two things that the informal version cannot. It tells everyone that the discussion is happening now, so people who were not at dinner are not quietly excluded. And it stops the group from voting on something in the same hour it first heard about it, which is where most regretted decisions come from.
Why it has to be separate from voting
When discussion and voting run together, the first few votes become part of the discussion. People who have not made up their mind can see where the group is going, and a good number of them follow it rather than think about it. This is well documented in group decision research as a cascade, and it produces results that look like agreement and are closer to momentum.
Separating the phases is the cheapest available defence. It also gives an objection somewhere to go before it becomes a block: a concern raised during deliberation can change the wording of the motion , while the same concern raised during voting can only stop it.
How long
There is no correct number, and length should track stakes rather than convention. In practice communities settle on something like a day for operational matters, a week for anything that commits money or changes a rule, and considerably longer for changes to the community’s own purpose or governance — the pattern behind decision tiers .
The people most likely to miss the window are the ones with the least time: shift workers, parents of young children, anyone caring for someone. A group that consistently decides things in a week has, without meaning to, weighted its decisions toward whoever has evenings free.
Sources & further reading
- 1 RCOS Core — Layer 2: Governance & Decision Logic — requires a review and deliberation process in the governance protocol
- 2 Seeds for Change — practical guides on running the discussion stage well
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 proposal written precisely enough to be decided — stating what changes, who decides, and by when.
A hold between a proposal passing and it taking effect, during which the result is confirmed before it becomes real.
Under consent, an objection serious enough to stop a decision — a named harm to the group's aim, not a preference.