Participation is not Ownership

🌿 Draft — a short note from 2020-10-31, lightly tidied. The core claim is here; the examples and caveats are not yet filled in.

In more "progressive" organisations and circles we often equate participation with ownership. That is a mistake.

Do-ocracy — decisions belong to whoever shows up and does the work — sounds egalitarian, but it reliably drifts toward the tyranny of the incompetent: influence accrues to those with the most free time and the most appetite for meetings, not to those with the best judgement or the most at stake.

The move that helps is to separate participation from governance. Let participation be wide, low-friction, and welcoming. Let governance — who decides, who is accountable, how power is checked — be an explicit, designed thing, not an accidental by-product of who turned up.

To develop: concrete cases where do-ocracy went wrong; what a clean separation of participation and governance looks like in practice; how this relates to ownership proper.