This page discusses the governance of Raft Foundation. For guidance on the governance of individual projects, see Project structure and governance.
A shared infrastructure that is accountable to its projects
Since its founding, Raft has had an ambition to integrate collective governance into every aspect of its operations - to be governed by its fiscally sponsored projects.
At the same time, we recognize that fiscal sponsorship is a highly professionalized field - a specialized craft - where specific knowledge and experience is essential to delivering a quality program. And, in the practice of fiscal sponsorship, there are certain moments where someone needs to make a “call,” one way or another, and there is not time to run a collective governance process.
Thus, we do not imagine a future where projects would do all the work. The day-to-day operations and decision making would still fall to the staff and leadership of Raft’s professional administrative team. Instead, our focus has been on accountability to project leaders, who would make up part or all of Raft’s governing board.
As Raft has become more than just an idea, we have become even more serious about this dream. We feel a strong responsibility to get this right, so that the pattern(s) we arrive at might also be brought into other organizations like us. And, getting it right also means taking things at the “speed of trust,” and not sacrificing the long-term viability of the shared infrastructure for blog posts, podcast interviews, or public relations points.
Long-term vision
The long-term vision remains the same: an executive leader that is accountable to the board of directors,1 which is made up of randomly-selected2 project leaders.3
The aspects of this we will have to contend with are:
- Conflicts and confluences of interest: how do we take advantage of projects’ collective self-interest without exposing ourselves to significant conflict-of-interest risks?
- Staff representation: should the administrative staff also have representation on the board, to better hold leadership accountable?
- Preaching to the choir: how do we ensure we do not become myopic and self-absorbed in a mundane, strategically-limiting sort of way?
- Professional expertise: how do we ensure that we continue to have access to excellent expertise in legal and financial oversight?
- Structural issues: how will this structure function within state and federal laws?
- Definition of “member”: Raft has envisioned developing a fellowship program and inviting non-project leaders as members - if it went through with is, would those fellows be entitled to any representation on the board?
- Legal requirements: how do we define “interested” and “disinterested” board members and how can we ensure we stay in compliance with regard to the balance between them?
- Member education: how can we ensure that every member that is asked to step onto the board is well-prepared to take on the role, and onboarded well?
- Details: how long are terms? can a member stay for multiple terms? should the board be all project leads, or just a majority?
Has anyone done this before?
Yes, an organization called Democracy Without Elections currently has a sortition-selected3 board of directors. We are in touch with them, and have also run the broad strokes of this plan past our legal counsel.
First steps
Our current board of directors is exploring next steps. The likely first steps for 2026 are to develop a strong education program for future board members, explore sortition platforms, and then invite - through that process - two project leaders to join the board. Our intention is to do this in the middle part of 2026.
Footnotes
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Current plan is 5 or 7 members. ↩
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A stratified sample, meaning that we can “weight” selections so that there is diversity within the board, matching our real diversity across individual and project attributes without directly tokenizing any one person. ↩
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This method of selection is called sortition. Each selected member would have the opportunity to decline. Willingness is the most important qualification. Read more about sortition in A Sortitionate Manifesto.pdf. ↩ ↩2