Proposals & Ratification

How a decision travels from a written proposal to something in force — and the phases most groups skip without noticing.

The short version

A decision travels through phases whether or not a group has named them. Naming them is most of the work.

A proposal is written precisely enough to be voted against, not just agreed with in spirit. Deliberation is a window where it is read and argued over and nothing is counted. Voting is a window with a close. Ratification is the gap between passing and taking effect — none, a delay, a sign-off, or a window in which a late objection still counts.

Most communities have the first and third of those and nothing else. The two they skip are where the avoidable damage happens.

Communities rarely come apart over what they decided. They come apart over not being able to say what they decided.

The pattern is always the same. A group talks something through and reaches what feels like agreement. Nobody writes down what exactly was agreed, who was entitled to decide it, or what would have counted as a no — because in the moment it seems obvious to everyone in the room. Six weeks later two people remember two different decisions, both entirely sincerely, and there is nothing to check either against.

The agreement was real. A record of it never existed.

A proposal is a thing you can vote against

That is the whole test, and it eliminates most of what groups minute as decisions.

“Agreed to improve composting” cannot be voted against. Neither can “we’ll be more welcoming to visitors” or “the maintenance situation needs sorting”. They are directions, and everyone can agree with a direction while picturing something different at the end of it.

A workable motion states four things. What changes, specifically — an amount, a date, a named thing. Who is deciding it — the whole membership, or the circle whose domain it falls in. By when — when voting opens and closes. And what would have counted as a no — the share it must clear, and how many people must take part for the result to count at all.

That last one has to be settled before anyone sees a number. Deciding the threshold after the votes are visible is how a group loses the same argument twice.

Writing proposals down usually makes meetings shorter, not longer, which surprises people. The reason is that the proposer does the work of being specific before forty people spend an evening discovering that they had each imagined a different plan.

The phases, and the two most often skipped

Six, and most proposals should move through fewer. Marking which ones a group is using is the point; running all six on a rota is bureaucracy.

Draft. Written but not open. The proposer settles wording, options and timing while changing them still costs nothing. Almost everything that goes wrong later could have been fixed here for free.

Deliberation — usually skipped. A reading and discussion window before voting opens, during which nothing is counted. It is the phase that lets a concern change the proposal instead of stopping it, and the phase that stops a group voting on something in the same hour it first heard of it.

Voting. The window is open and votes are counted. It has a close, published in advance, so nobody discovers the decision after it was made.

Objection window — usually skipped. For methods that turn on objection rather than arithmetic, the result is held as provisional for a set period, so a reasoned objection raised late can still stop it. See veto window .

Ratification — optional, and the subject of the next section. A hold between passing and taking effect.

Closed. Every phase complete. The outcome is final, and the tally sits on the record next to the rules it was measured against.

The two marked usually skipped are not ceremony. Deliberation is what gives an objection somewhere to go before it becomes a block. An objection window is what protects the member who was on a night shift. A group that skips both has decided that everyone reads everything and is always available, which is true of no community anywhere.

Ratification: four shapes, four different worries

Ratification is the gap between a decision passing and a decision being in force. Having none is a legitimate answer — the wrong move is having none because nobody asked.

Choosing between them means naming the risk. A group that cannot name one probably wants none.
Dimension	None	Cooling-off	Facilitator sign-off	Veto window
What happens	Takes effect when voting closes	A fixed delay, then it takes effect	A named person confirms it	Members may still object
Whose approval is needed	Nobody’s	Nobody’s — the delay expires alone	The facilitator’s	Nobody’s, but anyone may stop it
Protects against	—	Haste, and people not having heard	A procedurally broken result standing	Deciding without the people affected
Costs	Nothing to run	Nothing decides quickly any more	Real power in an administrative role	No decision ever feels settled
Suits	Reversible, operational business	Anything that changes how people live	Anything with money or a threshold	Changes to the agreements themselves

A cooling-off period is the unusual one, because it costs no authority. It hands nobody a judgement and nobody a veto — the delay simply expires. What it buys is time for someone who was away to notice, for the people affected to prepare, and occasionally for a group that has just spent three hours on something contentious to sleep on it.

Sign-off is the opposite: it puts a real decision in someone’s hands. Confined to process — was the quorum met, is the wording that passed the wording that was voted on, were objections handled — it is a useful check. It goes wrong precisely when it becomes a second opinion on the merits, at which point one person can quietly overrule the group.

One distinction worth keeping in the record: a decision that passed but was not confirmed reads not ratified, not failed. One says the group disagreed. The other says the process stopped it. Collapsing them loses the only information anyone will want in a year.

What the record has to survive

A closed decision needs to answer four questions to someone who was not there, three years later.

What was decided — the wording that actually passed, not a paraphrase.
Who could decide it, and who did — the body, the eligible count, and how many took part.
Under what rules — the method, the threshold, the quorum, published beside the result rather than remembered.
When it takes effect, and when it gets reviewed. A decision made under consent without a review date is not provisional; it is permanent, and nobody meant it to be.

Stand-asides belong on that record too. A decision that passed with nine people standing aside passed, and it is a different fact from one that passed with none — and the difference is invisible a year later unless somebody wrote it down.

What breaks

The decision that was never a decision. Minuted as a direction, so nobody breached anything when they did something else. The most common failure by a distance, and the cheapest to fix.

Everything gets every phase. A group discovers deliberation windows and ratification holds, applies them to the compost rota, and within a year is deciding less than it did before. Phases should scale with what the decision costs to get wrong.

The rules changed after the result. A threshold reopened, a quorum reinterpreted, a window extended because the outcome was inconvenient. It may even be the right call once. It is never a small one, and every member present remembers that the rules moved.

Nothing survives the chat thread. The decision existed, in a channel, in March, above four hundred messages about a dishwasher. A community that has to reconstruct its own decisions is starting each argument again with less patience than it had the first time.

Deep · what deliberation actually does to a group

The case for separating discussion from voting is stronger than “it feels more considered”, and the research also names a failure mode most groups do not expect.

Groups systematically under-share what only one person knows. In a classic experiment, Stasser and Titus (1985) gave group members different pieces of information about a decision and found that discussion gravitated overwhelmingly toward facts everyone already held. The unshared piece — often the one that would have changed the answer — frequently never surfaced. Later work replicated this repeatedly. The practical implication is uncomfortable: an unstructured discussion tends to confirm what the group already collectively believes, and the member who alone knows the roof was inspected in 2019 may simply never get to say it.

Like-minded groups move further, not toward the middle. Sunstein’s account of group polarisation (“The Law of Group Polarization”, 2002) collects a large body of evidence that deliberation among people who already broadly agree tends to shift the group toward a more extreme version of its starting position, not a moderate one. A community is, almost by definition, a group of people who already broadly agree.

Neither finding argues against deliberation. Both argue against relying on discussion alone, and they point at the same practical answers: publish the proposal in writing before the conversation, so information does not have to survive being raised out loud in a room; give the window enough length that someone who was not at dinner can still contribute; and collect votes independently of the discussion, so people record what they think rather than where the room appeared to be heading.

The honest limitation: this research is overwhelmingly built on laboratory groups of strangers making one-off decisions. Neighbours who will still be neighbours in ten years behave differently — sometimes better, because reputation and repetition are real, and sometimes worse, because disagreeing with someone you will see at breakfast is harder than disagreeing with a stranger. The mechanisms transfer; the effect sizes should not be quoted.

Sources & further reading

1 RCOS Core — Layer 2: Governance & Decision Logic — §4.5 requires proposal submission, deliberation, execution, documentation and appeal
2 VoteCast — how a decision travels — where EcoHubs implements these phases, including optional ratification
3 Stasser, G. & Titus, W. — Pooling of unshared information in group decision making (1985) — why discussion alone under-surfaces what only one member knows
4 Sunstein, C. — The Law of Group Polarization (2002) — why like-minded deliberation moves outward rather than to the middle

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

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