A platform owned by its members still has to be run. Rates have to be set, money has to be allocated, rules have to be agreed and occasionally changed, and someone has to represent the group when decisions are delegated. On a conventional platform a company does all of this. On Grassroots, the members do it themselves — and this work stream builds the system that lets them, fairly and at any scale.
Who decides
Grassroots platforms are governed by the people who use them, on the principle of one person, one vote. This is a deliberate contrast with the two models that dominate the digital world today. On corporate platforms, control rests with a single company, however many people depend on the service. On so-called decentralised platforms built around cryptocurrencies, influence is proportional to how much money you have staked — one coin, one vote — which simply hands control to the wealthiest participants. Grassroots rejects both. Each member has an equal say, and that equality is built into the system rather than promised on top of it. People are treated as active citizens rather than passive consumers.
What members can decide, and how
A working platform involves many different kinds of decision: setting a price or a commission rate, dividing up a shared budget, ranking priorities, electing officers or a board, drafting the rules everyone agrees to live by. Grassroots provides a single, consistent way to make all of them. Members put forward proposals and vote; the outcome that best reflects the membership’s wishes is adopted, and if no proposal commands enough support, things stay as they are.
Crucially, this extends to the rules themselves. Each community operates under a kind of constitution — the set of rules and rights its members have agreed to — and that constitution can be amended, but only by a clear majority large enough to protect the group from hasty or captured changes. Nothing is fixed by an outside authority; the members own the rules as much as they own the platform.
Designed so the decisions actually stick
Letting a group of people govern themselves online raises hard problems that this work stream is built to solve. One is making sure each person has exactly one voice — that no one can manufacture extra votes by creating fake identities. Another is recording decisions reliably across many independent phones, so that once the membership has decided something, that decision holds and cannot quietly be undone. The result is a governance system members can trust to behave as agreed, without a central administrator standing behind it.
Growing by joining together
Small, self-governing communities are valuable, but much of the power of a platform comes from scale. Grassroots achieves scale not by growing a single giant organisation but by letting independent communities federate — join together into larger groupings while each keeps control of its own affairs. A local delivery cooperative can federate with others in its sector, or with others in its region, or both at once, building up from town to region to nation and beyond. Federations can themselves federate into federations, so the structure can reach very large scale while remaining rooted in the local communities it is made of.
Keeping large federations fair
Representing very large numbers of people fairly is a genuine challenge — asking everyone to vote on everything quickly becomes unworkable. Grassroots draws instead on a much older democratic idea: choosing representative assemblies by lot, much as juries are selected, so that decision-making bodies are a fair cross-section of the membership and rotate over time. This spreads governance across the whole community rather than concentrating it in a permanent leadership, which is one of the main ways member-run organisations tend to drift away from their members.
A way out, always
However well a system is designed, members need a genuine alternative if they come to feel a community no longer serves them. In Grassroots that safeguard is built in: a group can always break away — take the open-source software, form their own instance under rules they control, and re-federate with others on their own terms. The permanent possibility of leaving is itself what keeps a platform answerable to the people who use it.
Where this work stands
The mathematical foundations of this governance system have been developed and published over several years. The task now is to turn them into working software running on the Grassroots infrastructure: a governance component that lets a single community run itself, and a federation system that lets many communities join together, both ready to be tested with real cooperatives and their members.