01
Boundary
Membership is based on affectedness. You're in because the thing hurts you—not because you bought a t-shirt or liked a post.
People keep waiting for permission—a charter, a 501(c)(3), a guy named Greg with a clipboard. You don't need any of it. The entire system of self-governance is five non-negotiable rules and a seven-step recipe. Read it once, print it, tape it to the inside of a locker. If the app vanishes tomorrow, this is the part that lives.
These aren't suggestions, a values statement, or the kind of thing you "aspire" to. They're load-bearing. Pull one out and the structure stops being RORBT and starts being every other org that promised to be different and wasn't.
Membership is based on affectedness. You're in because the thing hurts you—not because you bought a t-shirt or liked a post.
Consensus first. When consensus stalls, a named supermajority fallback breaks the tie. No benevolent dictator, no mystery process.
Every role rotates every 30 days. Power that sits still calcifies, and calcified power is the exact thing you're organizing against.
An append-only record of every decision and every dollar. Public-facing to the people it concerns. You cannot quietly edit the past.
Any role can be stripped by a simple majority—50%+1 of full members—with 48 hours' notice. The leash is short and it is always in the room's hand.
This is the entire structure. Not a simplified version of the structure—the structure. Everything in the stewards' manual is one of these seven moves, honored harder.
This is the first Orbit. No titles. No founding documents. A group of pissed-off people who trust each other is already more than most movements ever get.
Who knows whom. Who is trusted. Who is angry. Trust isn't a vibe—it's a graph, and you already carry it in your head.
Every new person is vouched for by someone already in. No open signups, no walk-ins, no infiltration-by-enthusiasm.
Hit the cap and divide into two Orbits. Each sends one mandated delegate to an Assembly. You scale sideways, never up.
Decisions, money, conflicts. Boring, relentless, append-only. The log is what survives the people who'll eventually try to rewrite the story.
Every role, every 30 days. Yes, even the one person who's weirdly good at it. Especially that person.
When you need scale, build a network of Orbits running the same protocol. Do not build a hierarchy. Hierarchies have a head, and a head can be bought.
Once an Orbit is moving, the work splits into five rotating roles. The point of naming them isn't ceremony—it's so everyone can see exactly what power exists and exactly when it changes hands. A role you can't name is a role someone can hoard.
Runs the meeting and the process. Never owns the agenda alone.
Keeps the Transparency Log, publishes within 24h. Can't bury things off-log without supermajority sign-off.
Holds the keys, executes the two-signature rule. Never spends unilaterally.
The outward face. Vouches for newcomers, maps relationships. Doesn't talk to media without a mandate.
Approves invites, watches for infiltration, audits opsec. Reports concerns—does not become the cops.
Three pairs of roles are kept in separate hands on purpose. This is the boring plumbing that stops one charismatic operator from quietly becoming the whole org.
Plus: max two standing roles per person, no role-holder serves as a delegate, and probationary members hold no roles at all. Tedious? Yes. So is rebuilding a movement after one person turned out to be a cop.
Every authoritarian's favorite move is "extraordinary times require extraordinary powers." So a handful of constraints are constitutional—no Orbit, Assembly, or charismatic crisis can vote them away. There is deliberately no lever for "just this once."
Treat nonviolence, anti-harassment, rotation, recall, and transparency as design constraints, not moderation preferences. A group that wants to drop them isn't asking for flexibility. It's asking to become the thing.