The problem of numbers: How does sociocracy work for large cooperatives? Ted Rau

Speaker: German citizen living in the USA. Co-founder of Sociocracy For All and co-author of Many Voices One Song. Transgender parent of 5 children. Previous career in Academia and linguistics. Living in co-housing.

Presentation: One of the values of cooperatives is to have democratic processes involving all members. The value of sociocracy is to have all workers be decision-makers. The two go together very well together in organizations where the number of members more or less matches the number of decision-makers in circles. It raises many questions in organizations with a large membership and fewer members who are involved operationally, for example, large cooperations like food coops and platform coops. How can sociocracy’s approach go together with the democratic approach? In integrating both, we can see (1) how sociocracy can be scaled beyond the worker voice and (2) how the bar can be raised for democratic processes and more participation and better information flow can be achieved for membership cooperation.

More on cooperatives and sociocracy.

Update (April 2021):
Read article “Sociocracy meets Listening at Scale” for updated information!

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