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What Is an Orbit

The atom of the whole system: 3–25 people who share a grievance and a shift. Small enough to trust, designed to split before it can calcify.

Everyone Core Concepts updated Jun 27, 2026

An Orbit is the smallest unit of RORBT: a self-governing group of three to twenty-five people who are directly affected by the same issue—a scheduling abuse, an unsafe floor, a slumlord, a school board banning books. Not a chapter. Not a committee. A small enough room that everyone knows everyone else’s shift, and small enough that trust is real instead of assumed.

Why small, on purpose

Big organizations get captured. A union local with ten thousand members has a president worth buying, an office worth raiding, and a membership list worth subpoenaing. An Orbit has none of those. There’s no throne, no central file, no single point of failure. When the people are the structure, there’s nothing left to seize.

It splits before it calcifies

An Orbit has a hard ceiling of twenty-five. When it grows past that, it doesn’t build a hierarchy—it splits like a cell into two Orbits. Each new Orbit is sovereign. They stay connected by sending a mandated, recallable delegate to a shared Assembly, forming a constellation—a network of peers, not a pyramid.

ORBIT 3–25 people SPLIT AT 25 cells, not an empire CONSTELLATION ○ = Orbit · ● = delegate
How an Orbit grows: it splits before it can calcify into a hierarchy, then federates through a mandated, recallable delegate—never a president.

That single rule—split, don’t scale—is what keeps power flat. No Orbit ever gets big enough to dominate the others, and no delegate ever speaks for anyone without an explicit, revocable mandate.

What every Orbit carries

  • A shared, concrete grievance—the thing it exists to fix.
  • Rotating roles so nobody becomes the boss. See Roles & Rotation.
  • A transparency log of every decision. See Append-Only Logs.
  • Two-signature rules for any money.
  • The right to recall anyone by simple majority, on forty-eight hours’ notice.

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