Structure and Governance - shared agreements in Nestr

The basics of governance in Nestr

Nestr aims to support you in manifesting your purpose using self-organisation. This means you will no longer rely on a management hierarchy to make decisions but will have some form of explicit agreements on how decisions are made. Nestr support many different ways of setting this up. So weather you use Sociocracy, Holacracy, Teal practices or some other form of role based work, Nestr supports it. And across these different ways to self-organise, there are some common practices.

In all cases, you'll use roles and circles to express how accountability is distributed throughout your organisation.

Every role/circle will be made up of:

• ‍Name: Best to use something that is easy to remember. e.g.: "Blogger"‍
• Purpose: A phrase that inspires whoever is assigned to that Role to know what is expected in the broadest scope. e.g.: "An blog that amuses readers with inspiring content"‍
• Accountabilities: A list of ongoing activities that the person on that Role is expected to be doing from time to time. e.g.: "Writing posts to the blog"‍
• Domains: Domains where that Role has exclusive control and possibly, policies to access that domains. If another Role needs access they can ask the domain owning Role to impact it. Or perhaps the owning role has published a policy on how to impact the domain. Ex.: "Blog admin functions"

when you enable self-organization in nestr, we'll automatically add some common core roles to each circle you create. We'll follow accepted definitions of these core roles dependent on the type of self-organisation you have selected for your workspace. In most cases they will look something like this:

• ‍Circle Lead: Generally represents the initiative starter or someone appointed to lead the strategy of the circle. Whoever is on this Role is responsible for structuring the circle and inviting new members into other Roles. Usually appointed from the outer circle.‍
• Facilitator: Facilitates regular circle meeting and can also give coaching and support on self-organization. This role is usually elected.‍
• Secretary: Focused on giving clarity on the agreements and organizational structure, also registers the circle meeting outcomes (like new projects, roles etc.). It's usually an elected role.‍
• Rep Link: Represents the circle members and needs on external circle meetings. This is usually and elected role.

You can configure which roles to use in your workspace settings and can even add custom roles if the default setup does not serve your needs.

Making changes to your governance

Any circle member can propose changes to roles, circles, and policies. This is a core principle of self-organisation. Nestr makes it simple to propose changes — either asynchronously or during a governance meeting.

For the full step-by-step guide on creating tensions, building governance proposals, running elections, and the async consent process, see Tensions & Governance Proposals: From Tension to Decision.