Motivation
How to choose the governing structure to ensure openness, accuracy and effectiveness of Open Religion?
Content
Why have a structure at all?
Creating an organization is more art than science. Even the best thought out plans can have unintended consequences. But not having an organization is a recipe for disaster for the cause. Very few causes have been successful without an organization and if they are faced with organized competitors, they are more likely to loose out. The challenge is to find the right amount of structure to help the organization grow in the right direction while having the right amount of decentralization to avoid becoming oppressive or even cult-ish.
Examples of balance of structure and decentralization for inspiration
Governance models of consensus based member-owned cooperatives , Open Source software communities like Linux, Debian, Ubuntu and the crowd-sourced encyclopedia, Wikipedia.
Organization Structure Option 1 : Ubuntu-Style
The Organization Structure below is heavily inspired from the Dynamic Governance model of open source software Ubuntu.
Here is brief description of each level
- Readers : Anyone is welcome to read the Open Religion Manual.
- Congregation : Having a community is a great benefit of any historical religion. A congregation is a small group of 30-60 readers who meet regularly and do activities together. There is no formal hierarchy within this group and so to maintain this egalitarian structure, once the group gets over 60 individuals we recommend splitting the group into two.
- Contributors : These are readers who take the time to update, comment or give feedback on Open Religion. Based on the quality and quantity of effort put in contributors will be assigned karma points taking inspiration from Reddit. Above a certain threshold of karma points contributors become get auto nominated to serve on the relevant commitees
- Committees : The main role of Committees is to take the top contributions/concerns from the community relevant to their specializations, assess its truth value or find answers to concerns and update the main Manual. The committees are composed of 10 experts from the field who can nominate other experts in their field to the committee plus two community contributors. The committees approve content by a modified consensus process
- Board of Directors : The Board of Directors is composed of three members nominated by each of the Committees and sets the direction for the entire organization, helps resolve conflicts and can exercise veto power over committee nominees and content.
Organization Structure Option 2 – Via-License
This option will have a main version of the Manual published every year and its license encourages people to take the main copy and create their own. The license can put some restrictions on these copies for example
- Derived works must provide a link to the main version
- Derived works must include TL;DR from main version
- Derived works must have a roughly similar structure of Introduction, Nature of reality, Treatment of self, Treatment of others and TL;DR
- Each Congregation must choose a Manual or create one of their own and report it
Each year the Central Committee looks at popular or interesting manuals and modifications and incorporates them in main manual
References
Comparison Open Source Community Governance : https://randyfay.com/content/how-do-open-source-communities-govern-themselves
Ubuntu Governance : https://www.ubuntu.com/community/governance
