From one room to many
Everything in the core course happens inside one room: one group, one proposal, one record. Some questions are genuinely bigger than one room — and this module covers what changes when they are. It introduces federation: how assemblies join on specific decisions without surrendering themselves to a head office, why the sealed record is what makes that possible, and how delegates and shared mandates carry a room's authority outward without losing it on the way.
E.1 The problem federation solves
Sooner or later a group meets a decision wider than itself. Three community gardens supply the same food bank and need a delivery schedule none of them controls alone. Five clubs share one hall and its maintenance bill. A network of neighbourhood groups wants to put a single submission to the council. In each case the decision must bind several rooms at once — and the two familiar ways of handling that both fail in predictable directions:
The two familiar failures
- The centre. Create a head office, committee-of-committees, or umbrella body, and let it decide. It works — and then it grows. The rooms slowly become audiences for decisions made elsewhere; the people closest to the facts are furthest from the pen. Every federated organisation that ended up despising its own national office got there this way, one reasonable centralisation at a time.
- The mush. Refuse any structure and coordinate by goodwill: liaison emails, joint catch-ups, "we should get the groups together sometime". Nothing binds, so nothing settles. Six months on, nobody can say what was agreed, by whom, or whether it still stands — and the most persistent emailer has quietly become the centre anyway, without ever being chosen.
Federation is the third path: each room keeps its own authority, and specific decisions join. Not a new body above the rooms — an agreement between them, decision by decision, with each room's consent given by its own process and recorded in its own record. The question federation must answer is the one both failures dodge: how do several rooms trust each other's decisions without a centre to vouch for them?
E.2 The join primitive: a record that proves itself
The answer is the thing you built in Module 5. A sealed record carries its own proof: the proposal as put, the full tally, the dissent verbatim, hashed and signed with the group's key, verifiable by anyone, anywhere, with no server and no central registry. That self-sufficiency is exactly the property federation needs. If Fernside's decision proves itself, the neighbouring gardens don't need an umbrella body to confirm what Fernside decided — they check the seal, and the seal doesn't care who runs the room it's checked in.
This is worth saying precisely, because it is the whole architecture: a federation of assemblies is, concretely, a set of sealed records that reference each other. Room A's record says "conditional on room B adopting the same text"; room B's record adopts the text and cites room A's reference. No third room, no master copy, no centre holding the "true" version. Each room is verifiable without a centre — so the rooms can join without creating one.
E.3 Delegates — and the bounded, recorded mandate
Rooms cannot deliberate with each other directly; people do that. So federation runs on delegates — and the entire craft of not losing your room's authority is in how the delegate is instructed. A delegate is not a representative-in-general, free to exercise judgement on the room's behalf about whatever comes up. A delegate carries a mandate: a written, bounded instruction that is itself an assembly decision — filed, deliberated, decided under a rule, and sealed like anything else.
What a mandate fixes
- Scope — the one question the delegate speaks to, and nothing adjacent.
- Bounds — what the delegate may agree to on the spot, and what they must refer back to the room. The refer-back list is the room's authority made portable; without it, sending a delegate is a transfer of power dressed as an errand.
- Duration — when the mandate expires. Mandates sunset like decisions do, and for the same reason: a standing delegate with no expiry is a centre in embryo.
- Reporting — when and how the delegate accounts to the room for what was said and agreed in its name.
And the enforcement rule, which must be said out loud when the mandate is adopted: a concession beyond the mandate does not bind the room. It isn't a betrayal to be punished — usually it's an overreach made in good faith, under pressure — but it is void until the room itself decides it. The question comes home; the delegate reports; the room decides. Because the mandate is a sealed record, "was this within the mandate?" is a question with a checkable answer rather than a fight about memory.
E.4 Shared mandates — the same words, decided in every room
Some joint decisions can't live in any single room's record, because they only exist if everyone adopts them: the delivery schedule itself, the hall's maintenance levy, the joint submission's text. The instrument for these is the shared mandate: one worded text, put separately to each assembly, each deciding by its own process and under its own rule, each sealing its own record of the result.
How a shared mandate works
- One text, several polls. The identical wording goes to every room. Each room deliberates and decides in its own way — one may consent-poll, another may use majority-with-safeguards. The federation standardises the text, never the rooms' internal rules.
- In force when all adopt. The shared mandate exists when every named room has a sealed record adopting it — and it is the set of those records, cross-referencing each other. There is no additional "federal" copy, because there is no federal body to hold one.
- Amendment loops back to every room. Change one word and each assembly must adopt the change. This is deliberately expensive — it is what "no room can be overruled from outside" costs, and the cost is the protection.
- Each room keeps its dissent. A room can adopt a shared mandate over internal objections, and those objections stay verbatim in that room's sealed record — exactly as in Module 4. Federation never launders a room's disagreement into unanimity.
E.5 The honest limit — don't federate what one room can decide
Federation is not an upgrade; it is a cost you pay when a decision genuinely spans rooms, and only then. Every federated decision is slower than a local one. Every delegate is meeting-hours and a reporting cycle. Every shared mandate multiplies the amendment loop by the number of rooms. A federation that pulls decisions upward because joint deciding feels weightier will strangle itself on its own coordination — and will have rebuilt the head office it was designed to avoid, just slower and with more paperwork.
The working test is one question: does this decision bind people outside our room? If no, it is yours alone — decide it locally, seal it locally, and tell nobody who doesn't ask. If yes, federate exactly the binding part and not an inch more. The delivery schedule spans three gardens; what Fernside plants in its own bed does not, and the day the joint meeting starts having views about it is the day the federation has begun to rot.
Discussion topics
- Which of your group's decisions actually bind people outside your room? (Most groups find the true list is shorter than they expected.)
- Where has your community seen "the centre" and "the mush" — and what did each one cost?
- If you sent a delegate tomorrow, what would be on your refer-back list?
E.6 Worksheet — Delegate Mandate & Federation Map
Two sheets. The Mandate is filled per delegation and adopted by your assembly like any proposal — take it through the same six steps you practised in the capstone. The Map is filled once per federation and revisited when it changes; its job is to keep the "only the whole" list embarrassingly short.
Delegate Mandate
| Delegating assembly | |
|---|---|
| Delegate (name) | |
| The question delegated — one sentence, as decidable as any proposal | |
| May agree on the spot to… | |
| Must refer back to the room… | |
| Mandate expires (date or event) | |
| Reports back (when, and to whom) | |
| Adopted by the assembly: rule, date, and record reference |
Read aloud when adopted: "A concession beyond this mandate does not bind the room — the question comes home."
Federation Map
| Room (assembly) | Contact / secretary | How it decides (its own rule) |
|---|---|---|