The collective decision-making area governs how groups within Fabric make decisions on behalf of or affecting others. It is one of the most developed areas with five specific protocols:
Together these protocols address the core tensions in distributed governance: ensuring that no single voice is overridden while no single preference can block progress, that authority is always visible and bounded, and that the informal accumulation of power is surfaced and interrupted.
When a group of agents adopts these protocols together around a shared domain, the governance structure that emerges is what we recognise as a circle – a self-governing group with a defined domain. Circles are not a precondition for these protocols; they are a consequence of enacting them together.