Ratification
A hold between a proposal passing and it taking effect, during which the result is confirmed before it becomes real.
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.
Ratification is the gap between a decision passing and a decision being in force. A group that has none is not doing anything wrong — it has simply chosen that the vote closing and the decision taking effect are the same moment. What matters is that the choice was made on purpose.
Most communities never think about this until the first time a decision passes on a Thursday, someone acts on it on Friday, and on Monday the group realises that four members were on a retreat with no signal and never saw it. The result was correct by the rules. It was also not what anyone wanted.
The four shapes it takes
- None. The decision takes effect when voting closes. Right for anything reversible, and right for most day-to-day matters — a hold on the compost rota is bureaucracy with no purchase.
- Cooling-off. A fixed delay before it takes effect, with nothing else required. See cooling-off period . It buys time for a mistake to be noticed without giving anyone new power.
- Facilitator sign-off. A named person confirms the process was followed — that the quorum was met, that the wording that passed is the wording that was voted on, that objections were handled. Not a second opinion on the merits, and it goes wrong exactly when it becomes one.
- Veto window. Members may still object during a set period after voting, and a sustained objection stops it. See veto window .
What each one is actually protecting against
They are not interchangeable, and choosing between them means naming the risk. A cooling-off period protects against haste. Sign-off protects against a procedurally broken result being treated as valid. A veto window protects the people who were not in the room. If a group cannot say which of those it is worried about, the honest answer is probably “none” — and adding a hold anyway just teaches everyone that decisions are not really decisions.
A ratification step also changes what the record says. A decision that passed but was not confirmed reads not ratified rather than failed — different things, and worth keeping distinct, because one of them says the group disagreed and the other says the process stopped it.
Sources & further reading
- 1 VoteCast — glossary — ratification as an optional hold after voting, where EcoHubs implements it
- 2 RCOS Core — Layer 2: Governance & Decision Logic — requires appeal and review mechanisms as part of a governance protocol
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 fixed delay between a decision passing and it taking effect, requiring no one's approval to expire.
A period after voting closes in which a member may still object, stopping the decision from taking effect.
A proposal written precisely enough to be decided — stating what changes, who decides, and by when.