Running the Village Governance Course
This guide is for the person convening the course — a chair, company secretary, governance lead, or trustee. The course is built to run in two movements: participants work through the eight didactic modules individually and at their own pace, and then the group reconvenes for a single facilitated session to complete the capstone exercises and scope a governance pilot. The didactic material does the teaching; your job is to convene the room afterwards and turn private reflection into a shared governance output.
How the course is structured
From self-paced study to a facilitated session
- Participants complete Modules 1–8 asynchronously, over a window of one to two weeks, fitting the modules around their other commitments.
- As they go, facilitators gather reflection notes drawn from the per-subsection discussion prompts — these are the raw material the group session works with.
- The group then reconvenes for the capstone exercises and pilot scoping, working from those reflections rather than from cold.
- The outputs of that session become the basis for a Village course event or a governance pilot — a concrete next step the board can act on, not just a completed course.
Design principle — teach the architecture before surfacing values
The self-paced version is deliberately designed not to require participants to agree in advance on values or strategy. Teach the architecture and the risk logic first; let the group session be the place where differences in institutional priority come to the surface. This is consistent with Village's pluralistic model, which treats value differences as real and often non-reducible — not as noise to be smoothed away, and not on the assumption that there is one hidden optimisation target everyone is secretly serving.
Recommended online structure
What a full delivery includes
- 8 didactic modules, 15–25 minutes each, completed individually.
- Short reflection prompts after each module, captured for the facilitator.
- Downloadable worksheets for each group exercise.
- One facilitator guide for chairs and governance leads (this document).
- Optional sector variants for health, land and resources, the public sector, and advisory firms.
Running the capstone session
Allow 90 minutes. The capstone moves the group from private reflection to a single shared governance memo. Keep each part time-boxed; the discipline of the clock is part of the exercise.
Session timing (90 minutes)
Four parts
- Part 1 — Risk statement (20 min): the group names the governance records and AI-mediated processes whose loss, mutation, or non-auditability would most threaten the organisation.
- Part 2 — Architecture statement (25 min): the group describes the target state — what trustworthy, sovereign, contestable records would look like for those processes.
- Part 3 — Action statement (25 min): the group identifies the near-term moves that close the gap between today's records and that target state.
- Part 4 — Report-back (20 min): the group consolidates and agrees the memo, including a candidate pilot.
Tone and facilitation guidance
Pitch it board-literate, practical, institutionally serious
Keep the register that of a board paper, not a manifesto. The goal is not to make participants adopt a political identity. The goal is to help them see that governance quality depends on something concrete: whether the records of deliberation, oversight, and AI mediation are trustworthy enough to support legitimacy under pressure — under audit, dispute, inquiry, regulatory scrutiny, or contested decisions. Hold the room to specifics about their own records, and resist drift into abstraction.