commonweal — governance that scales from 3 to 200

found a commons

Name your group and list its members. This generates a link — that link is the charter, shareable with everyone in it, no login and no server required.

commons name members — one handle per line (or comma-separated)

0 members

—

your handle (optional — highlights your seat)

sortition council

round tag — anyone in the commons who types the same tag draws the same council (try a date, or the proposal's name)

doge-style facilitator draw

A stylized four-step reenactment of the 1268 Venetian doge election: alternating rounds of lot (random draw) and ballot (nomination), so neither pure chance nor pure politicking picks who runs the room. Draws from the council above.

bring something to the council

proposal

vote

call a full moot — vote as the whole membership instead of the sortition council require a two-thirds majority (for weightier calls)

no votes cast yet

why this works at 3 people and at 200

3-person co-op. Council size = everyone, always — sortition has nothing to narrow. The doge draw still runs (lot then ballot) to pick who chairs the meeting without it always being the same person. Concord sits in as a fourth, non-human seat: a tiebreaker and a devil's advocate, not a vote that can outweigh two humans agreeing.

200-person commons. A fresh council of ~25-28 is drawn for every round, seeded from the round tag — nobody can lobby their way onto next week's council because nobody, including the person who calls the round, knows who it'll be until the tag is typed. Any member can force a "full moot" vote of the whole 200 if a council decision looks captured or just deserves wider buy-in.

the council formula

Groups of 5 or fewer: everyone is the council. Above that: round(2·√n), floored at 5 and capped at 25 seats. It grows with the group so a council never gets it easy by staying tiny, but it stops growing once a room of 25 is already too big to have a real conversation in.

concord, the ai delegate

Concord doesn't call a model — no Workers AI, no API keys, nothing that costs anything to run. It's a small script that reads a proposal for cooperative language (share, consent, rotate, repair, transparent...) against extractive language (control, hoard, coerce, surveil, monopoly...) and leans yes, no, or abstain accordingly, with its reasoning always shown. Treat it as a seat that never gets tired of re-reading the fine print for whose interest it actually serves — not an oracle, and easy to overrule.