Experiments in governance

Greetings, friends and members of (m)otherboard!

Thank you to all the folks who have joined us for our recent events. Last week's Mr Jesus screening was so full of energy and ideas for where to take the series and our community screenings next!

Our March 30 governance session surfaced some great insight from you all on how to think about the role of organizations in our governance and decision making structures. Our current governance model was built for individuals, and has no place for organizations. We are trying to thread the needle between meaningful participation and preventing power distortions that arise from outsized influence.

Folks brought up the idea of proximity to decision making and strategy: What level of strategic decision-making is a collective good partner proximate to, and how does that proximity deepen over time through trust-building?

One contributor offered a mic-drop question, which we are still noodling on: "Can we make more god(m)other nodes and then associate across god(m)other nodes?" Any and all thought partners welcome to explore that distributed collective governance seed.

At the end of our session we committed to synthesizing the collective input from the breakout groups and draft a prototype of the collective good partner rights/responsibilities/privileges and return the draft to the community for review. But we realized a couple things from the session as we are welcoming folks into our governance practices:

1. We’ve established a lot of trust and shared language in time spent building together as god(m)others. There’s work to be done to onboard new folks into the shared visioning. For example, our model isn't based on voting, it's based on consent, alignment, and objection. We're developing materials to better orient folks. Stay tuned!
2. The need for a new governance role for organizations came out of detailing what a collectively managed executive director position might look like if we were taken up on our Humanity AI proposal. Outside of that scenario, folks were looking for other cases of how a collective good partner might work in practice. We’re open to exploring a pilot use case as a means of developing out that governance role, but until we have that case, we’re focusing our limited capacity and attention on moving forward other projects in our portfolio for the moment.

Our ultimate goal is to figure out how to move out of competition for scant resources to mutually resourcing in movement building. We believe sharing governance agreements helps support those collaborations towards shared visions.

So we don't yet have a proposed rights, responsibilities, and privileges draft to share with you just yet. For now, we are asking movement-aligned organizations to reach out if you have ideas for a prototype use case. And let us know if you're in if we do get the Humanity AI callback. In the meantime, we encourage you all to become individual members in your personal capacity!

Next up:

Join us to continue exercising the social technologies of storytelling and dialogue that help us locate a sense of agency in our past, present, and future relationship to technology and each other.

May 13th 6–9pm 
Film Club: Ghost in the Machine Exclusive Screening (members only)
Valerie Veatch’s Ghost in the Machine, a feature documentary that premiered at Sundance 2026, approaches ubiquitous questions like “What is AI?”, “Who is building it?”, and “What will humans become?” by exploring how emerging technologies have historically reshaped identity, culture, and global power, while also exposing the current fronts of human exploitation without which AI would not function. RSVP (members only): https://luma.com/5y02hjjn

May 22, 2026 12–1:30PM ET 
Poetry Club: Going Virtual with Hazel Henderson (members only)
We are working with the Hazel Henderson Center to celebrate the poetry of Hazel Henderson, a world-renowned futurist, evolutionary economist, journalist, and visionary who promoted ethical markets, a love-based economy, and Golden Rule societies. Hazel “went virtual” (in her own words) on May 22, 2022. We can’t wait to introduce a new generation to Hazel’s work, kicking off with her poetry, “Pecos River Meditation” and “Cyberspace is Sacredspace.” We’ll talk about life after death in the age of AI. RSVP (members only) https://luma.com/hatfbe9s

July Book Club (dates TBD)
American Indigenous Democracy: A Call for Interdependence  (members only) tells the origin story about our founding documents and more importantly, about the wisdom of Native American ways of living and how they can be applied as an alternative to our present political dilemmas. Contemporary Haudenosaunee leaders and scholars speak about the league of their Six Nations, about life in present-day reservations, and most importantly, about the Great Law of Peace, the unifying code of governance. And (m)otherboard member Baratunde Thurston authored the introduction! RSVP forthcoming