“You see the unseeable,” my colleague said. He had spent years doing international development operations and he meant it as a compliment. We were in the middle of designing a participatory budgeting process for CSIDNet’s network of working groups, and I had suggested something that seemed obvious to me: instead of individual contracts signed by CSIDNet staff and each working group, why not just make one collective document that all the working groups sign together. In this way, they commit to each other and to the community-run governance committee rather than to staff.

He would not have thought of it, he said. That possibility, he said, would never have even crossed his mind.

The honest answer is that I wasn’t following a specific methodology in democratic governance or something fancy. I just foresaw that the usual way of going about contracting was wrong considering the culture we were trying to build (peer accountability). Of course individual contracts between working groups and staff would have been clean, standard, efficient, and clearly structured. But every enforcement and accountability action would then have been managed by and run through staff. The staff signed the document, so staff would hold the power (even if that is not anyone’s intention and even if the budget process itself was participatory).

But CSIDNet was explicitly trying not to do that. We were trying to build something where communities are accountable to each other, where the Governance Committee is made up of community members with real authority and where the usual nonprofit dynamic of a small detached advisory body of “experts” holding the actual power does not quietly reconstitute itself inside a process that looks democratic on the surface.

Paperwork is paperwork. Some might think it doesn’t matter. But I think the form of the agreement enacts a certain dynamic and relationship before anyone even acts within it. The structure can almost predetermine the outcome. In other work, I’ve played around with using “collaboration agreements” as a boundary object a la Star & Griesemer for community building (see a previous template I used during my fieldwork here). So I proposed an alternative form to CSIDNet – that working groups commit to each other and to the governance committee (made up of volunteer, elected community members). CSIDNet staff then become witnesses to the commitment, not its custodians.

I think this seemingly boring paperwork issue is not a semantic distinction. Who holds the contract is who holds the power, and the only question is whether the design makes that visible or obscures it. Legal infrastructure, like every governance structure, produces a set of relationships, distributes authority in specific ways, and tells people something about where they stand in relation to each other and to the institution. You cannot design a structure for community accountability and then use the same contractual architecture inherited from decades of top-down practice. Such structures keep producing the same social relations regardless of intent (this is why I’m a big fan of the legal templates and resources that SELC offers).

Efficient processes that reproduce the dynamics we are striving to design against is failure in my opinion.

The working groups signed a collective document and committed to each other. We don’t yet know whether it changes how they actually hold each other accountable; that will take more time to see. But the form is now different and to me, practice is politics.