Distributed governance in a distribution for local government

LocalGov Drupal is an open source collaboration between UK councils and Drupal developers. The aim is to provide a better publishing platform built on Drupal to save time, save money and to generate mutual benefit from pooling our knowledge and resources. It is now in Beta phase and with no certainty of future funding, there is a need to look at what a sustainable model looks like and move towards this. The project has so far been built by product managers, content designers and developers from a number of local councils together with several agencies. We expect this model of collaboration to continue, the question is how? And how can it scale from a handful of councils to 50 or 100?
Sociocracy is an organising framework based on principles of effectiveness, equivalence, transparency and autonomy. At Agile Collective we are a workers cooperative (where every employee has the right to ownership and control of the business) and have been gradually adopting sociocracy to run our business. Moving to a decentralised circle structure and using consent to make decisions and focusing on continuous improvement have had a big impact. Our belief is that many of the patterns of Sociocracy will help LGD now and in the future as it grows and evolves. The aim is a sustainable governance model that enables people to contribute effectively without typical modes of leadership and management.
Over the next few months, as part of the Beta project, we will be running an experiment to see if Sociocracy is a good tool for an open source project such as LocalGov Drupal. So far the signs are promising, though there is much work to do.
In this session we will have a story to tell, though at the time of proposals we have no idea what it is yet!
In this session we will give a brief introduction to LocalGov Drupal and Sociocracy, before taking you on a journey to find out whether our experience was a success.
Come take a ride with us...