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Meta-Organisation

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Some in DOD describe the group as a meta-organisation — on the premise that most democratic reform ideas being tried today have been tried before, somewhere, and the people building the next version are often unaware the lesson already exists. Rather than build a platform or run for office itself, DOD's role on this view is to pay attention across the whole reform landscape — tracking what's been tried, by whom, and what happened to it — so the lesson doesn't have to be re-learned from scratch each time.

It's a premise held by a few people in the group, not a settled institutional position. See Philosophy for it posed as an open question, and Occupy to Plurality: what the 2010s civic-tech wave built, and where it stalled for it applied to a concrete case.

Not the academic term

This is a different sense from the established use of "meta-organization" in organisational theory, coined by Göran Ahrne and Nils Brunsson (2005): there, a meta-organization is specifically an organisation whose members are other organisations — trade associations, the UN, ISO, and similar bodies — studied for the distinct dynamics that arise when members are organisations rather than individuals.1

DOD's members are individuals, not organisations, and DOD doesn't have organisations as formal members the way a trade association or the UN does. But it isn't purely a passive observer either — DOD directly assists other organisations when it can, informally, without that assistance depending on any membership or coordination structure. The word is being reused here for its plain-English "organisation about organisations" sense, not the academic one. Worth keeping the two distinct if you're reading DOD's usage against the literature.

A shared instinct, if not a shared mechanism

DOD isn't the only group reaching for this word. In conversation with the team behind Electron Workshop — a Melbourne-based network coordinating open-source, digital-rights, and internet-governance community groups — both sides independently described their own organisation as a "meta-organisation," and found the underlying philosophy converged even though the mechanisms differ. Electron Workshop's sense sits closer to the academic one above: a coalition that builds shared infrastructure its member groups can draw on directly. DOD's version is less formal — no membership structure, no shared infrastructure — but it isn't just theorising from the sidelines either; DOD also assists organisations it tracks directly, case by case, when there's something concrete to offer.

The shared philosophy underneath both usages has three parts. First, that different groups are often independently tackling versions of the same underlying problem, so effort and resources — attention, tools, people's accumulated experience — can be shared across them rather than duplicated inside each one working in isolation. Second, that individual organisations burn out and close — DOD's own retrospective on the 2010s civic-tech wave documents several, and even there the pattern recurs one level down: DemocracyOS's founders moved on to Democracy Earth and Open Collective rather than leaving the space when DemocracyOS itself stopped being maintained — but the people involved don't have to leave the space just because the organisation they were in does. A meta-organisation, on this view, is partly an answer to that churn: something built to outlast any single organisational vehicle, so accumulated effort and relationships don't have to restart from zero every time one closes. Third, the organisations either group relates to stay fully independent, not sub-organisations, branches, or chapters answering upward. Neither DOD nor Electron Workshop sets the direction of, or holds authority over, the groups they assist or track — whatever gets shared is shared with organisations that remain sovereign over their own choices, including the choice to ignore it.

Bigger, more neutral versions of the same idea

DOD isn't the only landscape-cataloguing meta-organisation in this space, and it isn't the largest one by a wide margin. Participedia (UBC/Harvard) is an academic "living encyclopaedia" of participatory-democracy cases and methods. Democracy Technologies (Vienna, part of the Innovation in Politics Institute) tracks 200+ democratic-tech platforms and describes itself, almost word for word in DOD's own terms, as a starting point "before building something new." Civic Tech Field Guide — founded the same year as DOD, 2016 — is a crowdsourced directory of 6,000+ civic-tech projects serving 50,000+ people a month.

What distinguishes DOD from all three isn't scale — DOD will never out-catalogue any of them. It's that none of the three apply a consistent evaluative standard to what they list; they're closer to neutral reference infrastructure than to DOD's own Accountability Framework, which judges good faith, hypocrisy, and structural inflexibility symmetrically, including against liberal democracies. DOD also has a local, continuous community behind it — meetups and a podcast running since December 2016, direct relationships with the organisations it covers rather than passive listings, and grounding in the Australian civic-tech scene specifically that a Vienna- or New York–based directory won't replicate. Judgment and proximity, not comprehensiveness, is the actual niche.

See also

  1. Wikipedia, "Meta-organization". ↩