VoteCast does not replace your meeting. It is the step after one — where what the group worked out becomes a decision on the record, with the rules it was made under written down beside it.
Six ways to decide, from a simple poll to consent decision making — the sociocracy standard of no paramount objections. One person, one vote. Public proposals or members-only. Plain enough that nobody has to learn a governance vocabulary before they can take part.
Adopt a rotating work-share schedule for the spring season
41 members eligible · 28 votes cast
Consent: the proposal passes unless a facilitator agrees an objection is serious enough to stop it. Nobody has to actively approve.
"The vote is the easy part. What a community comes back to, years later, is the record."
None of these look like a governance problem while they are happening. They look like a good meeting, a quiet member, a question nobody quite asked. The damage shows up much later, when the group needs to know what it decided and finds that the deciding was never written down.
A group talks something through and reaches what feels like agreement. Nobody writes down what exactly was agreed, who was in the room, or what would have counted as a no — because in the moment it seems obvious to everyone. Six weeks later two people remember two different decisions, both entirely sincerely, and there is nothing to check either one against.
The agreement was real. A record of it never existed.
Someone has a genuine reservation and no channel that fits it. Saying it in the room feels like blocking the whole group; saying it afterwards feels like going behind their backs. So it stays unsaid — and comes back months later as resentment, instead of arriving now as a question that could still be answered.
The concern did not go away. It just arrived too late to help.
A year on, nobody can show what was agreed, who was entitled to decide it, or on what basis. Not because anyone acted badly — because it was never written anywhere that outlasts a chat thread. So the group starts the argument again from the beginning, with less patience than it had the first time.
The decision was made once and paid for twice.
A tool fixes none of this on its own. But most of it is invisible rather than unsolvable — and a thing a group can see is a thing it can change. VoteCast takes the part that can be written down, and leaves the conversation exactly where it belongs.
A tool that runs a community's decisions is easy to misread — as a rulebook, as a substitute for meeting, as a way of making the difficult part go away. Here is the line we hold.
The meeting is where a group actually works something out. VoteCast is where that becomes a decision on the record — the same agreement, written down, with the rules it was made under attached to it.
Every member counts the same. No tokens, no weighting, no quiet advantage for whoever joined first or shows up loudest.
A poll, a ranked election, a majority motion, consensus, consent. The method is chosen per decision, because a paint colour and a constitution are not the same question.
How many people must take part, what share passes it, when the tally becomes visible, what an absence means — each one a setting you choose on purpose, and each one published beside the result.
Plain language throughout, and every term the platform uses is defined in public, so nobody has to take a governance vocabulary on trust before they can vote.
It never is, and it is not trying to be. Communities decide in conversation — around a table, in a circle, on a call. VoteCast comes after that, so the decision survives the week. If it ever replaced a conversation the group needed to have, it was used wrongly.
No tokens, no treasury, nothing on-chain, no wallet required to sign up. Platforms built for crypto organisations were the thing we kept finding, and the thing we did not want.
A method can give a reservation a name and somewhere to go, which is more than most groups have. It cannot make raising one comfortable, and we would rather say that than imply otherwise.
One person, one vote is the only weighting that ships today. Delegation, subgroups and richer eligibility are named as future work rather than implied as present features.
Most tools hand you one voting rule and let you live with it, which is how a group ends up running its constitution the same way it picked a logo. VoteCast offers six. Pick one to see how it works, what a ballot looks like, and when a community would actually reach for it.
Everyone picks one option. The result shows how the group split — nothing passes and nothing fails.
Which weekend do we hold the spring work party?
Which weekend do we hold the spring work party?
Illustrative — an example ballot, not a live proposal.
Result: A tally. No pass, no fail — just where the group stands.
A community can use a different method for each kind of decision, and set which is the default for which. Every term above is defined in public at the VoteCast glossary ↗.
One page per proposal: what is being decided, who may decide it, how long is left, and — once it closes — the result alongside the rules it was measured against. Drawn here as wireframes; the live app is one click away.
What is being decided, the options, who may vote and how long is left — on one page, in plain words.
The result, and next to it the rules it was measured against. This is the page a group comes back to in a year.
Every decision the group has made, in order. The thing that was missing when it all lived in a chat thread.
A poll about a shared meal goes draft, voting, closed, and that is the whole life of it. The other three phases exist for the decisions that deserve the extra weight — and they are there before the argument, not improvised during it.
Written but not yet open. The proposer settles the wording, the options and the timing while it still costs nothing to change them.
A reading and discussion window before voting opens. Nothing is counted yet — which is exactly the point of having one.
The window is open and votes are counted. Depending on the settings the running tally is visible to everyone, or to nobody until it closes.
For consensus methods: the result is held as provisional for a set period after voting, so a reasoned objection raised late can still stop it.
A hold on a passed result before it takes effect — a cooling-off delay, a sign-off, or a veto window. If it is not confirmed, the record reads "not ratified" rather than "passed".
Every phase complete. The outcome is final, the tally and the rules it was measured against are on the record, and it stops being a matter of memory.
Phase names with a dotted underline open VoteCast's public glossary.
And ten outcomes at the end of it, not two — passed, failed, blocked, tie, no quorum, provisional, recorded, elected, not ratified, indeterminate. A proposal too few people voted on and a proposal the group rejected are different events, and the record says which one happened. Read what each one means ↗
Each of these settings has a real cost in both directions, and picking one is a decision about power, not a preference. So VoteCast asks you to set them deliberately, and publishes what you set beside the result — because a tally whose rules you cannot inspect is not transparency, it is just a number.
The minimum participation before a result counts at all — a quorum.
Set it high and one quiet month blocks everything. Set it low and five people decide for forty.
The bar the approving side of a motion has to clear — more than half, or at least two-thirds.
Two-thirds protects a minority from a thin majority. It also hands a determined third of the group a standing veto.
Whether the running count shows live, only once voting closes, or not at all.
Live results let people see where the group is heading. They also let people follow it rather than think.
Whether other members can see how each person voted. Independent of when the totals appear.
Secrecy protects dissent. Openness makes people answerable for it. A community of forty rarely gets to have both.
On consent ballots, whether silence counts as consent or is simply left out.
Silence-as-consent lets a busy group decide anything. It also lets a decision pass that most of them never read.
Whether a member may revise or withdraw their vote before the window closes.
Changeable votes let a discussion actually change minds. Fixed votes stop a last-minute stampede at the close.
Each heading opens VoteCast's own definition of that setting, so you can check what it does before you set it.
A voting tool can make a group's rules explicit and hold it to them. Everything above still depends on the people in the room, and we would rather write that down than let the interface imply otherwise.
VoteCast is not a side project. It comes straight out of what EcoHubs is for — and out of a problem we ran into ourselves, early, with nothing on the shelf that fit.
"To make regenerative community living — rooted in care for people, land, and life — structurally accessible, resilient, and replicable, reducing humanity’s dependency on extractive systems one community at a time."
Communities rarely come apart over land or money. They come apart over decisions nobody wrote down — who decided, on what basis, and whether that was the rule the last time too. Making that part workable is not a feature. It is most of what the charter is asking for.
Read the purpose charter ↗EcoHubs decides in the open, and the RCOS Standard says a community should be explicit about how it decides — which is worth very little without somewhere to actually run it. What we found instead was built for DAOs and token holders: wallets, treasuries, governance dashboards. None of it was built for forty people sharing a valley.
Read about the RCOS Standard →A network of small, place-based hubs depends on each one being able to decide things without a crisis. Communities that are good at deciding together survive their disagreements; the ones that are not spend their years relitigating them. That is the difference between a network and a list of names.
Read the vision →The work-share, the budget, who joins — decided in the circle, then written down where everyone can find it again in March.
Motions, member votes and a record of who was eligible and what the bar was — the thing an assembly or an auditor eventually asks to see.
A group spread across eight time zones can still decide something, because a voting window does not require everyone awake at once.
A vote can be opened to the whole community or to a named committee — and a committee result is measured against that committee, not quietly against everyone.
VoteCast is deliberately narrow. It records decisions — it does not tell you what your decisions ought to be, it does not hold the conversation for you, and it will not find you the ground to make them on.
Small, place-based communities, each adapted to its land and culture, woven into a shared commons that gets stronger over time.
Read the vision →Proposals, deliberation, six voting methods and a record everyone can read — so an agreement outlives the meeting it was made in.
Open VoteCast ↗The standard is where a community writes down which decisions need which method, who is eligible, and how conflict gets repaired.
Read about RCOS →The standard writes the rule. The tool runs it. A rule nobody runs is a document, and a vote with no rule behind it is a headcount.
A community, a first proposal and an open vote take about ten minutes to set up. The methods, the settings and every word the platform uses are documented before you commit to any of it.
One person, one vote · Public or members-only · Every term defined in public
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