The art and science of governance

Every group decides things. Most never choose how — and the how decides the what.

Governance is the machinery a group uses to turn disagreement into something it can act on. It is a science in that the machinery has properties you can prove: some ways of counting can elect an option almost nobody wants, and this has been known, with the arithmetic attached, since the 1780s.

It is an art in that no single set of rules is best. Speed trades against deliberation; a high bar protects a minority and also lets one member freeze everything. Those trades belong to the group, which is why Solon ships 6 counting methods and 5 profiles instead of one opinion.

What follows is the design space, with working demonstrations. Nothing on these pages is a mock: the tallies are produced by the same functions that count a real session, so if the product changes, the lesson changes with it.

Four questions, always answered

A group that has never discussed its governance has still answered all four — by default, usually badly, and never on the record.

  1. 01Who may vote?ElectorateEvery member, or humans only — fixed per category, never per vote.
  2. 02What is the ballot?MethodYes/no, consent, approval, dots, score or ranked. The question shapes the answer.
  3. 03What makes it binding?Quorum and thresholdHow many had to turn up, and how much of them had to agree.
  4. 04How does anyone check?The recordSigned ballots on an append-only trail that anyone can recount.
Figure 1

Sometimes there is no answer to find

Three members rank three options; Which space do we renovate first? Every option is beaten by another, two votes to one, in a circle that never ends. This is not a tie and not a bug — the group genuinely holds preferences that no single winner satisfies.

2–12–12–1The hallThe yardThe kitchen

Computed by methodSpec("ranked").aggregate() — src/lib/domain/methods/ranked.ts

What Solon takes a position on

Almost nothing — deliberately. The methods, thresholds and quorums are the organization’s to choose, across 7 categories of decision.

Two things are not negotiable. A vote is a message signed by the member’s own key, so a tally is evidence rather than an assertion. And four categories — aid reaching a person, membership, safety, and the governance rules themselves — are closed to agents, so no organization can vote its agents into deciding their own suffrage.