Building Software that drives Sociocracy
We're on a mission to provide software tools that make it easy to adopt a sociocratic decision-making model.
Consensus at Scale
Whether you're a large organization or a small collective, Sociocracy is designed to scale in terms of size as well as level of engagement. You can start with a simple description of Circles and Aims, but progressively deepen your sociocratic toolkit to manage meetings and agenda, policies and processes, tasks and responsibilities. We believe that software tools should ease the initial adoption as well as ongoing operation of any sociocratic organization.
Synchrony
Synchrony is a software tool to enable and support core practices of Sociocracy in governing and operating an organization of any size. We've designed the Features based on our own experience working sociocratically for years.
Origin
Consensus Enterprises is an ethical technology company with a Mission to bring open and responsible tools to purpose-driven teams.
We adopted Sociocracy as our governance model about 6 years ago, and we've been enjoying the benefits of these practices ever since. As our understanding of Sociocracy has matured through implementation, and being technologists by trade, we naturally built software tools to support our needs internally.
An ad-hoc script to publish meeting minutes. A circle template in our static Operations Manual page to document membership. A decision extraction script to parse out Proposals from meetings and publish them as data. Over the years, we accumulated a collection of pieces that we came to view as the prototype for Synchrony.
Eventually we found that the burden of maintaining and administering this loose set of bespoke tools outweighed the benefit. We realized we needed a more coherent content management system to enable improvements that could support our growing understanding of Sociocracy.
Dreaming of Synchrony
About 2 years ago we began building that content management system, based on Drupal, with a goal of improving our own practices by streamlining and automating many of the steps that had become tedious in our prototype.
We dreamed of being able to easily adjust our circle structure, spawning or dissolving circles as needed. We imagined managing the hierarchy of Circle Aims through a simple interface, making it quick to enact changes to these key sign posts for the organization. Decisions that automatically collect in the system, linked back to the meeting in which they were discussed, but available to be listed, filtered, and searched independently.
We've been using Synchrony actively within Consensus for about 6 months now, and we've already achieved some of these dreams. We're still dreaming big about what Synchrony can become as an adoption on-ramp and toolkit for supporting organizations of all shapes and sizes to take up this innovative governance model.
About Sociocracy
Sociocracy combines consent decision-making, a decentralized system of authority and intentional processes to improve our decisions and processes over time into a governance system that supports effective and efficient process while increasing connection, listening and co-creation among members.
See Sociocracy for All for more details.
More about Consensus Enterprises
Consensus Enterprises envisions a more just world supported by an ethical, responsible, and inclusive IT industry. We help small teams do big things!
Founded in 2018, Consensus has built a small but powerful team of passionate progressive-minded technologists with an Aim to provide purpose-driven teams with ethical products and expertise to promote a more just world.
Synchrony is our first product to launch, and we are very pleased to share it with the Sociocracy community and the world!
Find out more details about Consensus at https://consensus.enterprises
Synchronize your circles today!
No matter what stage of adopting Sociocracy your organization is in, sign up for the Beta program to try Synchrony. It’s easy to get started!