Pursuance Task Management

Pursuances are built around specific goals, or “pursuances”, so it makes sense for the Pursuance platform to be task oriented. Because pursuances tackle a wide variety of topics they will do most of their work off the Pursuance platform using more appropriate tools, including wikis, source code management, shared text editors, and file hosting. Pursuance is a place to organize with other activists, and collaborate with other groups. Therefore we will place an emphasis on collaborative task management, leaving the nature of the tasks as generalizable as possible.

The Task Model

GitHub issues, while designed for tracking planned features and known bugs in software projects, work well for general task management. Lets look at how this idea interacts with the user, role, and permissions systems from previous posts.

Example List of GitHub issues

Tasks have a few attributes:

  • Title
  • Description
  • Date created
  • Status [Open/Closed, Active/Complete]
  • Assigned to: [roles and users]
  • Labels
  • Conversation thread

Tasks can be assigned to multiple roles and users, by anyone with a role granting them power to assign tasks to another role. For example, anyone in the “leader” role below has power to create tasks and assign them to anyone in “worker” role, or the “worker” role as a whole:

leader {
	assign tasks worker

worker {

By default, users can only see tasks that are assigned to them or roles they are in. This can be overridden with the cansee permission, such as:

leader {
	assign tasks worker
	cansee tasks worker

The above allows leaders to see any tasks assigned to workers. We could allow leaders to see all tasks assigned to anyone with cansee task *.

Task Labels

Tasks can be tagged with labels, defined by the pursuance:

GitHub Issue Labels

These labels have no structural or rule-based effect (so far), but are searchable, and provide an organizational level more fine-tuned than assigning to roles.

To implement this idea we need two new permissions:

Attribute Description
assign labels rolename Can set labels for any tasks assigned to a particular role
cancreate labels Can create new labels for use through the pursuance

Organizational Examples

We can build a multi-tier moderator setup, where the project leader can designate organizers, who bring in workers and assign tasks to them. Organizers label those tasks appropriately, acting as managers. This might look like:

project-leader {
	cancreate labels
	assign role organizer
	invite organizer

organizer {
	contact project-leader
	contact worker
	assign tasks worker
	assign labels worker
	invite worker

worker {
	contact organizer

(Note that we don’t have to give ‘project-leader’ all the same permissions as ‘organizer’, because anyone that’s a project-leader can simply assign the organizer role to themselves)

We can also create a simpler, more anarchic setup, where every member can create labels and assign them to any task:

member {
	cancreate labels
	assign labels *
	assign tasks *


Every task has a timeline associated with it, which describes how the task has changed, and includes discussion of the task:

Example GitHub issue timeline

Any user with a task assigned to them (or a role they are in) can comment on a task. They can also close or re-open the issue as they deem appropriate.

This timeline provides a task-based discussion space, organizing the entire pursuance akin to forum threads. This will probably be the primary means of communication for many pursuances, since most discussion will be about particular tasks. By allowing anyone assigned to the task to participate in discussion, we’ve created a private conversation space with only the relevant parties, reducing noise.


A key objective of Pursuance is facilitating collaboration between groups, rather than within groups. Tasks are the main unit for collaboration in Pursuance.

Therefore, tasks can be assigned to roles in other pursuances, so long as those pursuances accept by amending their rules. For example, say pursuances “greenpeace” and “investigating-enron” want to collaborate. Greenpeace might create a role like:

oil-investigators {
	accept tasks environmentalists@investigating-enron
	assign tasks environmentalists@investigating-enron
	assign tasks oil-investigators

While “investigating-enron” would add an equivalent role:

environmentalists {
	accept tasks oil-investigators@greenpeace
	assign tasks oil-investigators@greenpeace
	assign tasks environmentalists

Now anyone with the “environmentalist” role at the “investigating-enron” pursuance can assign tasks to themselves and the “oil-investigators” role at the “greenpeace” pursuance, and vice-versa. We can provide a graphical tool for “creating a new collaboration role” that fills out rules for a role as above, so users do not have to touch the Pursuance language unless they’re doing something especially clever.

This is more nuanced than two groups assigning work to one another. Since any user with a task assigned to them can add a message to the bottom of the task, we have effectively created a shared forum thread between two distinct communities. Users from each community can participate without previously knowing one another or explicitly adding one another to the conversation. We have an ephemeral, task-oriented, shared communication space for an arbitrary number of communities.

Further, this shared space includes only the relevant people from each community, without dragging in the rest of their infrastructure, making accounts on one another’s services, and so on.

In addition, we can create however many of these spaces are necessary through the creation of additional roles: “Here’s a task with our journalists and your journalists”, “here’s another task with our lawyers and your lawyers.” If additional expertise is needed, either pursuance can add more users or roles to the task, per their own pursuance roles.

Design Concerns

There are a few areas of the above proposal that aren’t fully thought through.

Changing Role and Pursuance Names

The above proposal works if we assume that role and pursuance names are constant. It is simplest to enforce constant names, but what happens if a pursuance is deleted? The collaboration rule no applies. What if a new pursuance is created with the same name as the old one? Does this introduce the possibility of attack through old pursuance rules?

Alternatively, we can use IDs, as in Discord. Internally, a rule would look more like accept tasks oil-investigators@<UUID FOR GREENPEACE PURSUANCE>, and when presented to a human we look up the UUID and substitute the current pursuance name. When the rule is written, a human writes the current pursuance name, and the UUID is substituted in. This allows pursuances to change their names without breaking collaboration rules, and prevents collision if a new pursuance with the same name is created after the old one is deleted.

We cannot use the same solution for roles, because the remote role may not exist yet - in the above example, the oil-investigators role is created before the corresponding environmentalists role is created, or vice-versa. Therefore, the rule no longer applies if the remote role is renamed. However, this may be fine - it allows any pursuance to change which roles are collaborating with which pursuances by changing the role names.

Task Visibility

Above we’ve described a cansee rule allowing different roles to see tasks that are not assigned to them. This makes sense in a larger organizational context, but is it unnecessarily complicated? We could allow all members of a pursuance read-only access to all tasks, and only assigned users and roles receive write-access.

This would simplify the structure of a pursuance, and perhaps make the UI simpler. However, it would also emphasize the use of multiple pursuances to a massive degree. For example, a group may have a “general worker” pursuance and a “trusted contributor” pursuance to create a separation of knowledge and trust.

In my opinion the cansee rule is beneficial, and a pursuance can manage trust and information using roles, and create multiple pursuances for separate broad objectives. This is worth having a discussion over.

How are Users Assigned

When a task is assigned to a role, access rights are clear: Anyone currently possessing the role has read and write access to the task, and if they have the role unassigned then they lose access to the task. If a user is part of multiple roles to which the task is assigned, they retain access unless they are removed from those roles, or the task is unassigned from those roles.

If we assign a task to a particular user within a role, this becomes trickier. Do we only track the user that the task was assigned to, and give them access so long as they are a member of the pursuance? Or do we track which role the user received access through, and automatically revoke their access when this role is removed?

I am a fan of the later, and envision a table for assignments akin to:

Task ID user ID role Pursuance ID

This allows us to track what users received what access via what role in what pursuance, and therefore when a user has a role removed we can unassign all applicable tasks with something like:

DELETE FROM task_assignments WHERE userID=X role=Y pursuanceID=Z;

Remaining Design Work

We now have a vision for what a pursuance looks like (a collection of users given various roles), what the main activity within a pursuance is (creating and assigning tasks, commenting on those tasks), and how pursuances collaborate (through creating shared tasks and inviting relevant parties). We’ve outlined a rule system to facilitate task, user, and role management.

This is a good structure once groups are established, but we’re missing the catalytic step: How do users discover and join pursuances? Inviting users into an existing community is effective only when you have an existing social network to build from, but one of the main objectives of the Pursuance Project is to make group discovery and participatory activism trivial.

Next up: How pursuances can present themselves to new users, and how we can visualize how pursuances are interconnected, and what skillsets are needed.

Posted 7/23/19

Pursuance Roles

Pursuance is a collaboration tool for activists, journalists, and other groups seeking positive change. At the heart of Pursuance is task management, information sharing, and communication, focusing on combining everyone’s unique talents and backgrounds, and adapting to the rapidly changing membership that plagues volunteer groups.

This post is a proposal for implementing roles and rules within Pursuance. It is compatible with, but does not require, the previous post on implementing Pursuance over email. This post is a bare minimum framework, and leaves significant room for expanding Pursuance rules as additional functionality is added to the platform.


Each user can have multiple roles within an organization, or pursuance. These roles can be used in:

  • Messaging (they work like a mailing list)
  • Task Assignment (out of scope for this post)
  • Pursuance Rules (discussed below)

This idea is inspired by Discord roles:

Screenshot of Discord Roles

On this chatroom platform, roles give users read or write access to different channels within a server, and a range of moderator powers including creating new roles and channels. Roles on Discord have an explicit hierarchy, determining which roles can assign which other roles, and what color a username appears in when the user has multiple roles.

We want to take this idea and apply it outside a chatroom, representing more flexible relationships than a simple hierarchy. Specifically we want to represent tree structures of who can contact whom, or community clusters with different expertise for reviewing documents, two use-cases discussed in an overview of Pursuance.

Pursuance Rules

A role is a title, combined with a set of permissions describing what users with the role are capable of. Therefore we need to describe Pursuance rules as we define roles.

Pursuance rules mostly describe what members do and do not have permission to do. What permissions exist?

  • Can create and edit roles
  • Can assign roles
  • Can contact another
  • Can invite users to pursuance
  • More as Pursuance develops

Initially pursuances have one user, the creator of the pursuance, with the role “founder”. This role has all permissions, thus allowing them to construct the rest of the pursuance as they see fit.

What do Pursuance Rules Look Like?

We need some syntax for describing pursuance rules and roles. Here’s a first attempt describing a document review system, where some journalists need help analyzing a trove of documents, and confer with experts when appropriate:

journalists {
	contact *
	assign role security-experts
	invite journalists
	invite security-experts

security-experts {
	contact journalists
	invite security-experts

Journalists are allowed to contact anyone, and can invite new members into the pursuance as either journalists or security-experts. They can also designate existing users as security experts.

Security experts can review certain documents on computer security topics. Therefore, they need to be able to communicate their findings back to journalists. They can also invite their peers as fellow security experts. However, they cannot invite users with any other roles, or promote existing users with different roles to security experts.

Creating Rules and Roles

Who can create roles or rules within a pursuance? Initially, only the founder, who has permission to do anything. Do we want to delegate this permission?

At first, delegation seems advantageous - we can allow moderators to refine rules for their community on behalf of administrators, or create regional community leaders who can create new roles for organizing local membership.

However, delegating this authority makes the rule system dramatically more complex. Do we add some kind of limit, like “members with the power to create roles can only give those roles subsets of the authority their own roles have?” What if the user’s permissions change? Does each role have a parent user it receives authority from? A parent role?

That’s a lot of complexity for a use-case that won’t occur often. How large do we expect a pursuance to get? Twenty users? A hundred, for some of the larger communities? How many roles and rules are necessary to administer such a group? Most pursuances will probably be satisfied with five or less roles, and rules that do not change, or rarely change, after group creation. Maybe more roles, if they’re used as simple team labels, but such roles would be boiler plate, used for task assignment and mailing lists only.

Instead, let’s keep this design as simple as possible, and enable complexity through linking pursuances together. Consider a political action group with city, state, and national levels. Instead of creating one massive pursuance with many roles and rules and complex delegation, we can create a tree of pursuances, each with their own organizational structures. Shared members between the groups act as delegates, and allow sharing of information and tasks between pursuances.

From a rule-making perspective, this means we can leave only founders with the power to create and edit roles. If a founder wants to delegate this power, they can appoint other founders.

Common Design Patterns

Expecting everyone to learn a new language to describe their organization’s social structure creates a high barrier to entry, even if the language is simple and easy to learn. Fortunately, this is largely unnecessary.

Instead of starting each pursuance with a blank slate, we can provide a list of organizational templates to choose from. This is pretty similar to what Overleaf does: LaTeX is a complicated language with a steep learning curve, so they provide a library of example LaTeX documents as starting points, dramatically simplifying the process for new users.

Not only does this make Pursuance easier to use, but it provides an opportunity to promote power structures we think are healthy or productive, exposing communities to new ideas.

Below are a handful of simple examples. As we expand the capabilities of pursuance rules, this list should be expanded.

The Chatroom

member {
	contact *
	invite member

To make this a moderated chatroom, we can add a second role:

moderator {
	kick member

The founder can now designate moderators, who have the authority to kick any member out of the pursuance.

Journalism Crowd-Sourcing

journalists {
	contact *
	assign role handlers
	invite journalists
	invite handlers
	invite sources
	kick sources
	kick handlers

handlers {
	contact journalists
	contact sources
	invite sources
	kick sources

sources {
	contact handlers

This creates a 3-stage filtering system, wherein journalists can recruit sources directly or recruit trusted helpers. Sources can present their findings to any handler, who can forward relevant information to the journalists. Handlers act as moderators, and can kick troll-sources or recruit new sources without interaction from journalists.

Additional Rule Attributes

Everything discussed about roles so far is for describing communication boundaries and recruitment of new users. What other attributes might we want to add? Here are some early ideas:

Attribute Description
group addressable Allow users to write to the entire group rather than individuals in it
public membership Make a list of users with this role public (within the pursuance? To people outside the pursuance?)
public tasks Make a list of all tasks assigned to this role
description A human-readable description of the powers and responsibilities of the role
cansee tasks X Can see tasks assigned to role X, or people with role X
cansee tasks * Can see all tasks in the pursuance
cansee files foldername Can see all files in a particular folder
canadd files foldername Can upload new files in a particular folder
canadd tasks rolename Can add new tasks and assign them to a particular role, or users with the role

Conclusion + Future Work

The role system defined above is pretty primitive, and will likely develop over time. However, this is already enough to describe how different people and groups can collaborate, how new users are added to a pursuance and assigned different roles within the organization, and how privacy is enforced.

By placing an emphasis on roles over users, we give a pursuance some flexibility as membership changes. Still missing is the ability to respond dynamically to membership changes. For example, we could add rules to a role such that when someone leaves the pursuance any tasks assigned to them are reassigned to the role at large, or to a random member within the role. This process can also occur automatically for inactive users. There’s some complexity surrounding which role to assign the task to if the user had multiple roles, but that’s for a later post on task management in Pursuance.

Also missing so far is any mention of how information is formally shared between pursuances - shared membership is sufficient for forwarding an email, and we should leverage informal systems like this whenever they are beneficial. However, it would be ideal if we could describe tasks that cross pursuances. These shared tasks would be assigned to different people in each pursuance, and facilitate task-based communication between pursuances, without explicitly merging the groups.

Posted 7/14/19

Pursuance Prototype: Email?

After my previous post I have an abstract understanding of what the Pursuance Project is trying to achieve. What would the technology itself look like? What existing technologies can we build off of to achieve our goals?

As a refresher, we need:

  • A concept of “users”

  • A concept of a group, which users can be a part of, called a “pursuance”

  • A way for users within a pursuance to message one another

  • A concept of “tasks” that can be assigned to users

  • Shared document storage

  • A “role” system for users, describing their expertise or position in the org

  • A permissions system that can be applied to pursuances, users, or roles, describing:

    • Who can contact who

    • What files can be read/written

    • What new permissions can be granted or revoked

Let’s set aside the document storage problem for a moment. The rest of Pursuance is a messaging system, with sophisticated permissions for describing who is allowed to message whom. What existing messaging platforms fit these needs?

We have a few open source messaging technologies to choose from, including IRC, XMPP/Jabber, Keybase (client is OSS, server-side is not), mastadon, and email. Rather than addressing pros and cons of each individually, what do we want out of our chat system?

We want something with an intuitive or familiar UI, and we want something that emphasizes thoughtful communication over banter. This actually rules out most chatroom software like IRC, secure texting replacements like Signal, and Twitter-like platforms like Mastadon. Keybase is attractive due to its inherent encryption, but doesn’t support much in the way of permissions controlling what users can message one another, and is notably a noisy chatroom like Discord or Slack.

What about email? Tools like spam filters control what accounts can email one another all the time, the model is trivially understood by anyone that’s used a computer, and the format is significantly longer-form than text messaging or tweets, hopefully facilitating more thoughtful communication.


Let’s say a Pursuance server is running a classic mail stack, like Postfix and Dovecot. This is a closed system, only accepting mail from Pursuance users and refusing to deliver anything externally, so we have a lot more control over configuration.

The Pursuance client can either be a desktop app or a web app with email functionality. It differs from a standard mail client in that it adds the pursuance as an extra mail header (or maybe as the domain, like @pursuance-name?), to track which pursuance two users are communicating through.

Since Postfix and Dovecot can use a database to retrieve lists of users, we can now have a few SQL tables for tracking login information, what users are in what pursuances, what roles users have in each pursuance, and what rules apply to the pursuance.

We can add a filter to Postfix that calls an external script before accepting or rejecting mail for delivery. This script can be arbitrarily complex, querying SQL, parsing pursuance rules, and ultimately choosing whether or not to deliver the message.

Additional Messaging Functionality

Want to send files between users? Email attachments are implicitly supported.

Auto-deletion of old messages? We can set up a pursuance rule that periodically triggers deletion of old emails.

End to end encryption? There are longstanding PGP standards for encrypting emails with a user-supplied keypair. This is usually tedious to set up, because every user has to install and understand tools like GPG - but if we include pre-configured encryption support in the Pursuance client, this is a non-issue. We can use the Pursuance server as a public keyserver (storing the public keys in SQL), or support using a public keyserver for redundancy.

Decentralizing server hosting? This is still a stretch goal, but email between mail servers is obviously an existing standard, and we can build from there.

Task Management

To organize a pursuance we need a concept of tasks that can be assigned to a user or group of users. With heavy inspiration from Github issues, tasks have the following attributes:

  • Task ID

  • Task Name

  • Task Description

  • Task Status (Unassigned, Assigned, Complete)

  • Assigned to Users (list)

  • Assigned to Tags (list)

All of this can be pretty easily described in an SQL table and hooked up to the existing user management database.

File Sharing

We need a large amount of storage space to store all files for all pursuances. Do we use a big hardware RAID like what’s provided by Digital Ocean? Do we use a more conventional cloud solution, like a paid Google Drive plan? The best answer from a software side is to be implementation-agnostic. We have a big folder on the Pursuance server that we can keep things in. How do we manage it?

Let’s store all files with a UUID, in a directory space like storagedirectory/pursuanceID/fileID

Each file has an entry in the database with the attributes:

  • Pursuance ID

  • File ID

  • File name

  • Parent Folder ID

We can simulate a filesystem by adding “folders” to the database with the attributes:

  • Folder ID

  • Parent Folder ID

  • Folder name

We can now apply pursuance rules to folders, creating a permissions system. We can add some kind of REST API like:

GET /directories/:pursuance: - Returns an XML structure describing all folders visible to the user, subject to pursuance rules

GET /file/:fileid: - Returns a file, if the user has permission to access it

POST /fileupload - Uploads a file with specific name to specified folder ID, if user has permission


Most of the Pursuance infrastructure can be implemented relatively easily on the server side, using SQL for tracking accounts, groups, tags, and files, and using email as an underlying messaging technology. There’s a lot to build ourselves, but it’s a lot of pretty simple database and REST API work.

There are two major challenges with this approach:

The Client

We need a pretty sophisticated client, and it’s going to be built largely from scratch. If we build a web-app then we can re-use some pre-existing components (mostly repurposing some webmail client), but that’s still a lot of JavaScript and UI work, well outside my area of expertise. However, this is going to be the case for any approach we take. Even building on top of a platform like Keybase would require making significant UI additions for the rules system and issue tracking.

The Rule System

This is the heart of Pursuance, and what makes it more valuable than “email + Asana + Google Drive”. The rule system deserves a whole design document on its own. Is it a configuration file, with rules written in XML or JSON? Is it a domain specific language? Do we make it text-based and oriented towards programmers and sysadmins? This may be easier to implement and more versatile, but will require a kind of “pursuance specialist” per pursuance to set up the rule infrastructure. Alternatively, do we give it some kind of graphical editor like Snap in an effort to make the rules easily writable for any volunteer?

Once again, the rule system will be a significant obstacle no matter what infrastructure we build Pursuance on. This seems like a feasible design from a first glance.

Posted 6/24/19

Pursuance Project Initial Impressions

I recently had a conference call with several excellent people at the Pursuance Project, a platform facilitating collaboration between users working towards shared social goals, and enabling collaboration between separate or overlapping groups working towards related goals. If that sounds vague, broad, and ambitious, it’s because it is. This is about allowing new power structures over the Internet, with unprecedented flexibility. Let’s look at a few examples to clarify.

Use Cases

The Journalist Pyramid Scheme of Information Flow

Barrett Brown’s first example crystallized the vision for me. A journalist wants to crowd-source information gathering. Unfortunately, getting tips from the public is a high-noise low-signal endeavor: Many people will submit what is already public information, or will submit conspiracy theories and nonsense. Instead, what if the journalist has a handful of trusted contacts, and they charge these contacts with gathering information and filtering the noise before forwarding the interesting tips to the journalist. These trusted contacts find a number of sources of their own, and give them the same mission - gather information, filter the noise, and report the remaining content upstream. This trivially distributes labor so the journalist can talk to a handful of contacts and receive high-quality aggregated information from a large number of sources.

We can add extra features to this system for sending some messages above a filter, to identify incompetent members of the group, or re-submitting tips to random locations in the tree to increase the chance of and speed up propagating upwards to the journalist. The basic premise of distribution of labor remains the same.

The Document Tagging Problem

Another collaborative task featuring journalists: A group has a large number of leaked or FOIA’d documents. They need to crowd-source tagging the documents or building a wiki based on the documents, to summarize the information inside and make content searchable. This is a more sophisticated problem than “filter out gibberish and obvious falsehoods from the messages sent to you”, and involves assigning tasks to individual or groups of volunteers. There may be categories of volunteers (such as specialists that understand certain kinds of technical documents), and different members may have different permissions (only some trusted individuals can delete irrelevant documents). However, the problem is fundamentally similar in that we have groups of volunteers communicating within some kind of hierarchy to prevent the chaos of an unregulated chatroom like Slack or Discord.

Pursuance Objectives

Building a unique platform for each of the above use cases would be wasteful. Each would be relatively obscure, there would be lots of duplicate code, bringing users onto a new platform for a specific project is effort-expensive, and - critically - the two projects may want to interact! What if document taggers in the second use-case are also information sources in the first use-case, feeding information about important documents they find up to a journalist? Instead, it would be better if we had a unified platform for social collaboration of this kind, so users create a single account and can interact with any number of social action groups with ease.

This means that Pursuance cannot be built for a specific type of group, but must be adaptable to many group structures. In fact, the main function differentiating Pursuance from other messaging systems is a language for describing the social framework being used. Build a system that can describe and enforce the structure of the journalist-pyramid, and the document tagging expert-clusters, and other groups will be able to adapt it for a vast number of social needs.

Technical Requirements

What are the bare-necessities for meeting the above two use-cases? We need:

  • A concept of “users”


  • A way for users within a pursuance to message one another


  • Shared document storage



    • Who can contact who

    • What files can be read/written

    • What new permissions can be granted or revoked

Some nice-to-haves:

  • End-to-end encryption for messages between users

  • Zero-Knowledge encryption of files, so the hosting server cannot read them

  • Decentralization, allowing different pursuances to host content on their own servers and link them together

Group Discovery

The above structure is sufficient for running organizations with existing users. However, a large problem in activist and non-profit spaces is peer-discovery and avoiding duplication of effort. Pursuance should also provide an easy way to discover other organizations, perhaps by searching for their titles, descriptions, or viewing shared membership. Imagine something as follows:

Diagram of pursuance discovery

Maybe the circle size is based on the number of participating members, and the color indicates the number of messages sent / number of members in the past 30 days, as a vague indicator of activity. Edges indicate shared membership, pulling collaborating pursuances close on the map. Selecting a pursuance, like Signal, displays an additional description of the group’s purpose.

We need to add the following attributes to a pursuance to achieve this:

  • A pursuance title

  • A pursuance description

  • Some pursuance-level permissions for what information can be shared publicly:

    • Number of members

    • Identity of members?

    • Activity level

    • Messages

    • Files

Concluding Thoughts

This is a complicated project. One of the most difficult and important tasks for Pursuance will be making this technology intuitive, and hiding the complexity as much as possible when it is not critical for users to understand. From the perspective of the journalist in the first use-case, we probably want the journalist to see and send messages to their trusted contacts, and that’s all. Let the trusted contacts manage the complexity of the pyramid structure. Perhaps it makes sense for each group to have a “pursuance manager”, much like a sysadmin, who is more well-versed in the technology and manages the rules that make the pursuance tick.

Posted 6/21/19

Group-Grid Theory for Classifying Social Groups

I’ve recently been introduced to Group-Grid Theory, a framework from anthropology for classifying group dynamics and power structures. Let’s examine the model from an interest in intentional community building.

Under Group-Grid theory, communities are described along two axes, predictably “group” and “grid”. Here, “group” means how cohesive the community is, in terms of both clear delineation of membership (it’s obvious who’s a part of the community), and in how group-centric the thinking and policies within the group are. Slightly more complex is “grid”, which represents how structured the group is in terms of both leadership hierarchy and sophistication of / emphasis on rules.

Group/Grid Low Grid High Grid
Low Group Individualism Fatalism
High Group Enclavism Hierarchy

The above four groups are the most extreme corners of the axes - of course any real group will contain attributes along both axes, and land in a gradient rather than discrete categories.

The Four Archetypes


This is the organizational structure we’re most used to, for organizations like corporations, the military, and student clubs. Membership is explicitly defined by initiation rites including contracts, swearing-in ceremonies, paying dues, and attending meetings.

The organizations not only have well-defined rules, but formal leadership hierarchies like officer positions, defined in bylaws or community guidelines.

When problems occur in these communities, they fall back on rules to assign responsibility or blame, and determine what courses of action to take.


Enclaves are groups without complex, well-defined structure, leadership, or rules, but clearly-defined membership qualities. Examples include communes, families, and other “horizontal” organizations.

These organizations are not without power dynamics, and frequently assign implicit authority based on experience or age. Membership is based on physical proximity (often living together), shared contributions of labor, or shared genetics.

In these organizations, problems are often framed as something external threatening the in-group. Conflict resolution revolves around the in-group collaborating to either deal with the external force, or in extreme circumstances, growing or shrinking the in-group to maintain cohesion.


Individualist organizations, as the name implies, have neither strong respect for authority nor clear group boundaries. These can include loose social “scenes” like hactivism or security culture, social movements like Black Lives Matter, or loosely organized hate groups. There are shared attributes in the organization, such as an ethos or area of interest - otherwise there would be no social group at all - but there is minimal structure beyond this.

Membership in these groups is usually permeable and self-defined: What makes someone a part of Anonymous beyond declaring that they are? What makes them no longer a member of that community, except ceasing to speak in those circles and dropping the Anonymous title? As members join and leave with ease, tracking the size and makeup of these groups is extremely challenging.

When these groups face pressure they fragment easily, making multiple overlapping communities to encompass differences in opinion. This fragmentation can be due to disagreements over ideology, hatred or reverence of a particularly person, group, or action, or similar schisms within the in-group. This apparent lack of consistency can in some ways serve as stability, allowing groups to adapt to change by redefining themselves with ease.


Fatalism describes organizations with sophisticated rules and rituals, but no communal behavior or allegiance. One example is capitalism as an ecosystem: There are rules of behavior governing money-making activities, but there is no care given to other participants in the community. In ultra-capitalist models, corporations are cut-throat to both one another and their own employees, prioritizing money-making over community health. Other fatalist groups include refugees, governed by the system of rules in their host country, without being cared-for members of it in the same way as a citizen.

These groups are called fatalist, because there are no tools for addressing conflict: The leadership structure hands down decisions and their effects, and there is little recourse for those impacted. The community holds little power, and has little trust in the benevolence of the grid.

Early Thoughts

The Group/Grid lens illustrates trade-offs between making groups with formal rules and leadership systems, and building a more anarchic self-organized group. It also shows benefits of declaring formal membership criteria and focusing on community-building, or allowing permeable, self-defined membership. Early intuitions are that a focus on community builds a more committed membership, which will be less prone to fragmentation and dissolution. Unfortunately, strong group identity can also breed toxic group dynamics, as members are more invested in seeing their vision realized and more resistant to “walking away” when the group moves in an incompatible direction. Similarly, group hierarchy can be efficient for decision-making, but can alienate the community if applied bluntly. Hierarchy works great at a local level, as with school clubs, where it’s effectively just division of labor. If the grid is no longer operated by the community, then we inevitably reach fatalism, which has extreme drawbacks.

These are sophomoric first impressions, but now I have group-grid as a tool for describing and analyzing groups, and can apply it moving forwards. I’ll probably return to this topic in future posts as it becomes relevant.

Posted 6/13/19

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