Domain
The decisions a circle or role may make alone, and the limits it may not cross without asking.
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 domain is the boundary of a circle ’s or a role’s authority: the decisions it may make by itself, and the point past which it has to come back to the wider group. It is the difference between delegation and consultation, and it is the single most common thing missing when a community says it has adopted sociocracy and nothing has got faster.
What a real domain states
- Subject. What the circle is responsible for — the buildings, the land, the welcome of new members.
- A budget, or another concrete limit. A number it may spend without asking. This is what turns a domain from a description into an authority, and it is the part most often omitted.
- What it may not do. The decisions that look like they belong here and do not — usually anything that changes an agreement, commits the community long-term, or affects who is a member.
- What it reports, and to whom. Delegated authority without a reporting line is not delegation, it is disappearance.
The test
If forming a circle has not made the general meeting shorter, the domain was never real.
This is unusually easy to check, and it catches almost every case of the pattern being adopted in name only. A maintenance circle with no spending authority still brings every repair to the whole group for approval, which means the community has added a meeting rather than removed one. Members experience this as sociocracy being bureaucratic. What is actually happening is that nobody was willing to let go of the money.
The opposite failure
Domains can also be drawn too wide. A circle that can commit the community to a five-year lease is making a constitutional decision inside an operational structure, and the group will only find out when the bill arrives. The corrective is the same as everywhere else in governance: name the limit explicitly and default an unclear case upward, to the wider group, rather than downward.
Related terms
A small team with a defined domain it may decide within, linked to the wider group in both directions.
A governance system organising a group into linked circles, each with its own domain, deciding by consent.
A table mapping each kind of decision to who may make it, by what method, and within what limits.