---
title: "Weaving between circles"
description: "At least one member of each circle participates as a full member of a neighbouring circle"
url: "/weaving-between-circles/"
tags: [protocol, decisions]
readingPathPosition: 29
---

# Weaving between circles

Part of the [Collective decision-making](/collective-decision-making.md) area.

**Accord.** At least one member of each [circle](/circles-are-a-basic-unit-of-shared-governance.md) participates as a full member of a neighbouring circle – not as a "representative" reporting back, but as someone who genuinely holds both relationships simultaneously. Two circles are neighbours when their domains overlap, when one circle's decisions regularly affect the other's domain, or when one is a sub-circle of the other. The weaver is selected by the circle they come from, for a limited term, and participates fully in the governance of the receiving circle – raising agenda items, forming proposals, and raising objections. This is Fabric's adaptation of the sociocratic linking mechanism, with a deliberate departure: where conventional linking sends a representative to "stand for the interests" of one circle in another, Fabric's weaver holds both relationships as their own.

**Ritual.** The weaver brings not just information but felt experience between the two spaces – what it's like to sit in each circle, where the energy is, where the tension is. This embodied carrying is what distinguishes weaving from reporting. The weaver's capacity is developed through the same somatic disciplines described in [Consent-as-default](/consent-as-default.md): attunement to the felt dimension of collective life, not only its informational content.

**Critique & Contemplation.** The weaver periodically reflects with both circles on what is flowing between them and what is not – and what the blockages reveal about the network's health. Is the weaver becoming a bottleneck or gatekeeper? Is information flowing in both directions, or has the link become asymmetric? Whose experience is carried across, and whose is left behind?

## Sources

- Linking mechanism adapted from Bockelbrink, Priest & David (2019), *Sociocracy 3.0 – A Practical Guide* and Rau (2023), *Collective Power: Patterns for a Self-Organized Future*

## In this vault

- Previous: [Tending shared roles](/tending-shared-roles.md)
- Next: [Conflict engagement](/conflict-engagement.md)
- Referenced by: [Circles are a basic unit of shared governance](/circles-are-a-basic-unit-of-shared-governance.md), [Collective decision-making](/collective-decision-making.md), [Design for scale](/design-for-scale.md), [Information flow](/information-flow.md), [Protocols](/protocols.md)