Mindful Living CommunitiesGoverning
Govern in the open.
Agreements people can understand and use: who decides, who owns what we build, and how it passes on. We intend to work them out in the open and improve them as the community learns.
The odds · 7 of 7
The handoff with no heir.
A generation of owners (shops, firms, farms) is reaching retirement with no successor in sight. When a business closes or sells out of town, the ownership never comes back.
What a community doesn’t own, it can’t steer.
Coverage rose; ownership fell. Over decades, the ownership of what shapes a place (its capital, its institutions, its decisions) drifted far away. So when things change, the people who live there don’t get a say.
A place can see clearly and act with energy and still lose what it builds. Ownership can drift somewhere else, a founder can step away, a windfall or a crisis can rewrite the terms. Governing is how a community can keep what it makes, and keep the right to change its mind.
Source:Home page (our site)
Our answer: ownership that stays, decisions made together.
Agreements for how a place decides, owns and hands things on, written in the open and free to take. One place we’re testing it: Cooperative Exits, where employees become the owners.
Communities already govern themselves, with bylaws, meetings, votes and co-ops. We don’t start by replacing any of that. The question we’re asking is narrower: can the way a place decides take in new evidence, act on it, and learn from what follows?
Source:Our research, 2026
That’s why governance is meant to grow with the work, not ahead of it, starting with a room that can make one decision and learn from it.
Source:Governance in practice (our site)
How it fits with seeing and acting
Seeing, acting, and governing inform one another. Here’s how governing connects to the other two, as we propose it.
Source:How the work fits together (our site)
What seeing gives governing: evidence. Under our proposal, a concern someone raises would reach a person responsible for it and get a visible answer. A community’s own accounts, considered alongside other relevant evidence, would help test whether an agreement worked. One rule is already written down: seeing someone’s situation gives no one authority over them.
Source:Our proposal and working rules
What governing gives acting: who can decide and act. That means who may decide, how far the work goes, and how results come back. A proposal isn’t an approval. Under our proposal, people would agree who takes on the work and how it’s reported back, including what didn’t work.
Source:Our proposal and working rules
How the record closes the loop. In the rooms we propose, one person would keep the record: the question, the decision, the next step, and what came back. Under our proposal, the record of the work would be reviewed monthly, and people would vote or consent before any change enters the governing record; no proposal would become governance on its own. What comes back from the work would shape both how we decide and what we look at next, and a result would never approve the next step by itself. The public record we propose covers governance decisions, not anyone’s private journal.
Source:How the work fits together and Governance in practice (our site)
Two rules we’ve already written down. None of the three kinds of work gets ahead of the other two. And we build with AI tools, but they never vote, consent, or count votes.
Source:Our working rules
What we’ve found: the research behind this →
Where it stands
Proposals, written down.
The governance proposal is published. Cooperative Exits is in testing. Read the proposal and tell us where it breaks.
Today most of this work lives with one founder, and documenting it and practicing handover are part of how we plan to pass it on.