The Eleven Assemblies of the Fractal Stack

Every scale at which people gather to decide, from one person alone to the relations between worlds — each level existing to enable the levels beneath it.

Self-governance is not one room. It is the same act performed at every size, and the sizes nest. Individual — a person recovering their own responsibility, authority, and agency, and deciding for what is theirs to decide. Family — a household in dialogue over what a household holds. Citizen Impact Group — a few neighbours meeting a need or solving a problem together. Organizational — people assembled into a formal body to accomplish something. Community — the assembly of a place, debating and deciding what the place will do. Bioregional — localities together, with the voice of the living land brought into the room. Regional — bioregions coordinating and supporting one another across a geography. National — regions represented where nations still act. Global — the uniting assembly where national bodies share wisdom and face what no one faces alone. Universal — the highest abstraction, holding relations between the ØNE, the Living System, humanity as a species that will not stay on one planet, and whatever other life comes to be known.

The stack is read in one direction only, and getting the direction right is the whole teaching: each level is an enabling and supporting structure for the levels below it. It does not command them. A regional assembly exists so that localities can do what localities cannot do alone, and for no other reason. The moment a level begins to direct the level beneath rather than serve it, the stack has inverted into the thing it replaced, and the inversion is usually invisible to the people at the top of it.

This is why the pattern can go all the way up without becoming an empire. Authority originates at the bottom, with the sovereign person, and is lent upward in named, revocable portions (Subsidiarity Of Authority · Federations vs Empires); support flows downward, ungrudgingly, because the higher levels exist for that. What holds it together is not enforcement but interoperability: shared purpose, shared agreements, and the ordinary human willingness to keep a word given at one scale when standing at another.

Ten of the eleven are recognisably political. The eleventh is not, and it is the one the list is unwilling to leave out: a world that can decide about itself has to be able to hold, in some room, the questions of what it owes to the living world, to the generations not yet born, and to whatever else is out there.

Also called: the fractal stack · the levels of assembly · Individual · Family · Citizen Impact Group · Organizational · Community · Bioregional · Regional · National · Global · Universal Stands on: Sovereignty · Subsidiarity · Consent · Levels Of Scale · Holarchy Opens onto: Council · The LIØNSBERG General Assembly · Federation · Federations vs Empires · HoloFractal Governance · Holofractal Omnifederation · Community · Bioregion · Living Systems Member · Representation In play: beyond — met the first time a question outgrows the table it arose at Sources: LIØNSBERG Wiki Books/Citizen Led Governance/2.2. The Structure of a Federated and Decentralized System (unmarked; the enumeration is this page's spine) · LIØNSBERG Wiki Books/Citizen Led Governance/2.7. The Pattern for Voluntarily Organizing and Federating (unmarked) · lionsberg.wiki: The LIØNSBERG Approach to Citizen Led Governance Open: The eleven are named with a function each and nothing else — no convening rule, no threshold, no term, no recall, at any level. The source book names these as its own gaps. · How an assembly at one level is constituted by the level below, in practice, is unwritten. · The Field's Council carries the act of convening and none of this stack; the two have not been reconciled.