Posted: October 2018
On October 1, 2018 the Decision-Making Working Group proposed that the CIRTL Network adopt Sociocracy and voting as components of a blended decision-making process. This proposal was voted on during the Fall 2018 In-Person Meeting at UW-Madison. Based on the existing PI-based decision making structure, this vote was advisory to the Director, Bob Mathieu. Following the vote on October 11, 2018, Director Mathieu accepted the Network’s recommendation to replace the prior decision-making structure with the blended decision making proposal. This page details the proposal in full.
CIRTL Decision-Making Proposal (PDF)
CIRTL Decision-Making
Summary
The Decision-Making Working Group (DMWG) proposes that the CIRTL Network adopt Sociocracy and voting as components of a blended decision-making process. We recommend that Sociocracy be employed as the sole decision-making process for working groups, operations groups, and standing committees. In cases where these bodies seek input from the whole Network before reaching a decision among themselves, the early stages (discussion rounds) of the Sociocratic process should guide those broader discussions. The Director, as advised by the Leadership Team, has the authority to determine when an issue needs to be decided by the entire Network rather than a single committee; in those cases, we recommend that an abbreviated Sociocratic process described below guide discussions of the whole in order to inform a Network-wide vote on the issue.
Sociocratic process in committee work
Sociocracy is a process of iterative rounds of discussion where all voices are expected to contribute. In each round of discussion, everyone present must speak, either to ask a question, make a comment, or simply to say “pass.” Typically, there is a preliminary round of discussion intended for clarifying questions only. Subsequent rounds allow participants to express opinions, concerns, questions, and/or suggested changes. In a final round, participants must say whether they support the proposal under discussion or not; at this stage, participants are welcome to raise “paramount objections” – concerns so significant that they cannot be accommodated without reworking the proposal itself. In those cases, objecting participants work with the proposer to revise the proposal and return it to the group for future deliberation. A facilitator guides the group through each round of discussion, ensuring that all voices are heard; that comments, questions, and concerns are addressed; that paramount objections are accurately defined; and that next steps for any proposal needing revision are identified.
Discussion of the whole Network
A modified Sociocratic process is proposed to guide discussions that precede decisions of the whole Network. The proposal will be posted one week ahead of discussions so that any member of the community may post questions or comments anonymously or identified in advance of the meeting. When a proposal is discussed in-person or online, everyone present is invited to speak. Discussion is organized into two key phases: first, participants can pose clarifying questions only; then, participants can share comments, concerns, and questions. A facilitator guides the group through each phase of discussion, ensuring that all present are invited to share their opinions; unlike in a strict interpretation of Sociocracy, the facilitator will not require input from every present participant in each phase of discussion. Discussion periods must begin in meetings, either in-person or online.
Transition from discussion to voting in the whole Network
We believe that the Network will be able to cast more informed votes when those votes take place after the kinds of inclusive and equitable discussions enabled by a Sociocratic process. To transition from discussion to voting, at the end of a discussion round any participant can propose a motion to call the issue to a vote. Following Robert’s Rules of Order, that motion must be seconded and then voted upon; to pass, the motion must receive a majority of votes cast by all present eligible voters (see “Network voting process” for eligibility details).
Network voting process
Votes on a motion to bring a proposal to a vote and votes on a proposal itself can take place at either online or in-person meetings. Only Institutional Leaders and Administrative Co-Leaders are eligible to vote. As a result, each member institution receives two votes. Institutional Leaders and Administrative Co-Leaders can have proxies cast votes on their behalf; institutional leaders must alert meeting facilitators when sending a proxy/proxies.
Members must receive advance notice of proposal votes so that institutional leaders, administrative co-leaders, and/or proxies can be in attendance when a vote is cast. In practice, this means that when a motion passes to call a proposal to a vote, the proposal vote will take place at a future meeting and not at the current meeting. The facilitator can recommend that the proposal be brought to a vote at the next online meeting, or held until the next in-person meeting.
The facilitator will notify members of upcoming votes via meeting agendas and meeting reminders; in these reminders, the facilitator will recap the issue being voted upon as well as key points raised in prior discussion rounds. In meetings where proposal votes take place, the facilitator will once again recap the proposal and key discussion points before votes are cast.
In order to pass, an item must receive a super-majority of 90% of votes cast. Leaders (or their proxies) can cast yes votes, no votes, or abstentions. Institutions without eligible voters present forfeit their right to vote and will be recorded as absent. The meeting facilitator will distribute results to Network leaders via the online CIRTL Network Team Community.
Submitting proposals to the Network
Proposals can come from people and entities at various levels of the Network:
- The Director
- The Leadership Team
- A CIRTL standing committee (e.g., CNOG)
- An ad hoc committee or working group (e.g., DMWG)
- An Institutional Leader or Administrative Co-Leader
- A participant from a member institution (e.g, CIRTL Staff; institutional staff, graduate
student leaders, postdocs and faculty)
All proposals are submitted to the Leadership Team, which reviews them and advises the Director on how to proceed. The Leadership Team may advise that the proposal is best decided by an existing committee, operations group, or working group; that a new working group should be formed to discuss and decide on the proposal; or that the Network as a whole should discuss and decide on the proposal.
If the proposal is sufficiently articulated and straightforward, the Director may invite the author to present the proposal to the appropriate body. Otherwise, the Director will review the proposal and delegate it to a standing committee or ad hoc working group that will refine the proposal through the following process:
- Review the proposal;
- Determine what additional information or feedback is needed;
- Seek feedback from appropriate audiences;
- In collaboration/partnership with the author(s), modify the proposal as appropriate
and required so that consensus of the members of the committee or group agree that
the proposal is ready for a final review and decision; - Return the proposal to the Leadership Team which then advises the Director to allocate it to any of the above-mentioned decision-making bodies.
The Director will provide an annual status report to the Network on all proposals submitted to the Leadership Team, including any action taken on these proposals.
Justification
Why Sociocracy
Sociocracy underpins essential values that bring us together as a Network: we respect our colleagues, we seek to elevate different points of view, and we embrace reasoned arguments that help us iteratively improve our collective collaboration. We recognize, however, that Sociocracy is a process that is complex, demands a constantly informed body of members, and relies upon the involvement of a consistent collection of members. The very flexibility that allows the CIRTL Network to be such a vibrant source of pedagogical discovery is the same thing that makes Sociocracy a challenging process for us to adopt wholesale. For that reason, we recommend this blended approach of sociocracy plus voting – one that reaffirms our values while being pragmatic about our unique organizational needs.
Why voting
Put simply, voting allows a fluid organization like ours to make important decisions with a process that everyone – trained and untrained, new and experienced members alike – can readily adapt to. When blended with a mechanism like Sociocracy that allows for inclusive, equitable discussions, we believe voting gives the Network a clear process for reaching decisions on the most important business before us.
Implementation
Developing facilitators
We believe that offering some type of facilitator development will help bring a broader diversity of voices to the fore in our important Network-wide discussions. Therefore, to support this proposal we recommend that the Network leverage expertise within its ranks to invest in ongoing facilitator development. Skilled members would be encouraged to run “how-to” workshops on effective facilitation at our in-person meetings, and to provide additional trainings on an as-needed basis. With guidance from the Leadership Team, these workshops and trainings could be counted in-kind contributions as part of the Network’s ongoing efforts to broaden in-kind opportunities.
Timeline
The DMWG recommends that this proposal be accepted by the Network at the Fall 2018 in-person meeting. Following our current – albeit informal – process, we recommend the Network cast an informational vote on this proposal so that the Director can assess Network sentiment before approving or declining this proposal. If approved, the proposal would go into effect in January 2019, giving the Network time to identify and develop facilitators by the end of the year. After roughly one year, at the Spring 2020 in-person meeting, the Network will assess the effectiveness of this proposal following the guidelines below.
The Assessment
At the Fall 2021 in-person Network meeting, we will evaluate whether these new decision
processes are working through the collection and presentation of data. Both the Network Leaders and members of the Network will be sent a Qualtrics poll ahead of the meeting, scoring the following metrics using a rubric provided as part of each survey question:
- Alignment with CIRTL mission – do they feel decisions have been aligned with the CIRTL mission?
- Timeliness – does CIRTL operate efficiently using the new processes?
- Clarity – how well have they understood the process and how they can contribute?
- Fairness – do they feel decisions within CIRTL have been fair using the new processes?
- Opportunity for all – do they feel they have had sufficient opportunities to provide comments and contribute to CIRTL decisions using the new processes?
In addition, we will evaluate the impact of requiring a super-majority of votes (90%) of votes cast for a proposal to pass as well as evaluate the impact of allowing anonymous comments.
Related Items for Ongoing & Future Consideration
In our deliberations, the DMWG discussed many significant items that factor into how the Network makes decisions; ultimately the DMWG determined that these items were in fact distinct from our charge. While the list below is by no means exhaustive, we want to share some of the larger items that came up in our discussions, which we urge the Network to take up in future working groups and/or Network meetings.
Bylaws
We repeatedly ran into questions that are typically answered in an institution’s bylaws: who has the right to vote? How are votes decided? What items should be determined by voting, as opposed to by committee, as opposed to by select staff (i.e. the Network Director)? What happens when a member fails, repeatedly, to take part in the voting process? We attempted to answer some of these questions for the sake of providing much needed direction for the Network in the near-term, but we acknowledge that over the longer term there is an urgent need to develop official bylaws for the Network. This need is all the more important given the possibility that the Network may move away from the PI model in the future, and will certainly be opening up membership in the future.
Inclusivity & equity in Network business
In our discussions we frequently asked ourselves how any given proposed decision-making process embodies the values of inclusivity and equity that are not just core to the work we do with future faculty, but to the work we do internally, among ourselves. These values will not be attained with a single proposal, or a single process; rather, their very nature is ongoing. While we hope our proposal takes steps towards advancing these values, we want to reiterate here that we must continually strive for greater equity and inclusion within our ranks.
Update: CIRTL Value Statements were adopted on December 4, 2019.
Organizational transparency
Effective decision-making depends upon an informed membership. Operating with transparency can only help keep our members informed. While transparency is important for the proposal we’ve laid out, it is also a significant undertaking. What does it mean to be transparent? What records should be open? How should records be shared? How frequently should different types of information be shared? What do we need to consider to ensure that information sharing is productive, and doesn’t just lead to people being overwhelmed by seemingly irrelevant or hard-to-digest data? These questions and more deserve thoughtful consideration by some future body.
Suggested draft language for consideration:
Ensuring a transparent process
It is important that these processes are transparent to all members of the CIRTL community at each step. In particular, we propose that (1) Working groups that use sociocracy post meeting notes that reflect how they arrived at decisions and the comments raised during deliberation (2) The LT posts short reports of how proposals are delegated to a working group or the full Network, or the outcomes of proposals discussed and decided within LT itself.