Published by the Commonwealth of Humanity
Date: May 4, 2026
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COMMUNITY GOALS
The Commonwealth of Humanity intends to center its community building around the universal breadth of constructive and creative human endeavors.
But primarily, the Commonwealth recommends that our initial efforts center around discussion sessions, journalism and investigation, neighborhood outreach, mutual aid, and education. Other examples of worthwhile focus includes amusement and entertainment, musical and artistic expression, cooking and eating meals, farming, foraging, natural studies, and sharing content.
We recommend coordinating through a Signal group chat with like-minded community members, and meeting every Saturday morning at a local library, park, or community center.
Public educational meetings may be recorded, live streamed, summarized, or photographed only when the assembled members have been told in advance and given a meaningful chance to opt out of being identified. Conflict resolution sessions, mutual aid requests, safety matters, and personal disclosures should not be recorded, live streamed, or published by default.
Community assemblies should be a place where members meet up to build rapport, but also to seek conflict resolution, request mutual aid, share skills and resources, and organize collective action on matters affecting the group.
Community principles
Community. Skills. Accountability. Act and build together. Don't let dogma divide you. Local first. Hold people accountable, but especially hold power accountable. Listen more than you speak. People over ideology. Replicate what works. Break bad habits.
Operational boundaries
A Commonwealth community is not a court, police force, employer, landlord, prison, state agency, therapist, medical provider, or substitute for emergency care. It has no legitimate authority to confine, threaten, stalk, surveil, extort, expose, or physically punish any person.
The community may create records, make findings, request restoration, separate from a member, warn other members about a credible safety risk, and organize material support. These powers are social and voluntary. They must be used with restraint, evidence, and accountability.
No community process should require a harmed person to remain in contact with a person who harmed them. No ideological position against state power should be used to isolate a harmed person from medical care, legal advice, emergency services, family, friends, outside advocates, or any other support they choose.
No person should be pressured toward or away from contacting law enforcement. The Commonwealth condemns existing law enforcement institutions as a militant enforcement arm of a criminal state, but that condemnation does not authorize the community to control the sovereign choices of a harmed person.
Membership and participation
Each community should define membership before a conflict arises. Membership may be based on recurring attendance, stated agreement with the community's principles, participation in mutual aid, journalism, investigations, organizing work, or another standard adopted by the group.
Each community should also define which decisions are open to all attendees and which decisions are limited to members. New attendees should generally be welcomed into discussion and work immediately, while voting eligibility, facilitation eligibility, and access to sensitive conflict records may require a cooling-off period adopted in advance.
No cooling-off period should be used to create a hidden hierarchy, exclude people on the basis of poverty, disability, race, nationality, gender, sexuality, religion, caste, age, housing status, immigration status, or political disagreement made in good faith, or shield existing members from accountability.
Security, privacy, and records
Signal or another end-to-end encrypted communication tool may be useful for coordination. Members should still assume that no digital system is perfectly safe. Do not post another person's address, employer, immigration status, medical condition, family information, private messages, photographs, or identifying details without consent.
Meeting notes should record decisions, tasks, and agreed principles without unnecessarily naming people. Sensitive records should be limited to the minimum necessary facts, kept only by members appointed for that purpose, and deleted when no longer needed unless preservation is required to protect a harmed person or document a serious pattern of abuse.
Secret recording is strongly discouraged. Recording a private conversation, mediation, or conflict session should require the informed consent of all participants, a stated reason for the recording, a defined storage location, limited access, and a deletion date. Where local law or personal safety creates a different necessity, the safety of the harmed person takes precedence.
Always request consent from all present parties before recording conversations. If consent is not given, do not record conversations.
Public naming, publication of allegations, or warnings about individuals to other communities should require a higher threshold than internal safety action. The community should consider whether publication is necessary to prevent further harm, whether the evidence is sufficient, whether identifying details can be reduced, and whether publication would expose a harmed person to retaliation.
Conflict resolution
When a member has a grievance against another, a three phase process is preferred, the final phase requiring review by a community assembly, unless direct contact would be unsafe, coercive, retaliatory, or unreasonable under the circumstances. These three phases are as follows:
Phase 1 direct resolution
The two parties should first attempt to resolve the conflict between themselves where it is safe and realistic to do so. The Grievant party is required to operate in good faith and clearly state the grievance, the requested restoration, and the facts they believe support it. The responding party should have a reasonable chance to answer. Neither party should publicly campaign against the other before this phase has concluded, unless silence would expose someone to immediate danger or continued harm.
Good faith does not require a person to endure intimidation, repeated contact, harassment, manipulation, or emotional coercion. Either party may involve a support person, or opt to use written communication or a mediator instead of private direct contact. A person may also skip this phase when the conflict involves threats, stalking, assault, sexual harm, coercive control, serious exploitation, retaliation, or another safety risk.
Phase 2 peer mediation
If Phase 1 fails, is unsafe, or is not appropriate, two other community members agreed upon by both parties where possible are brought in. These mediators are responsible for gathering facts from both sides separately, asking what outcome is being requested, identifying immediate safety concerns, documenting points of agreement and disagreement, and presenting a neutral summary to the parties.
Mediators must disclose conflicts of interest. A mediator should not serve where they have a close personal, financial, romantic, political, housing, employment, or dependency relationship with either party, or where they have already publicly taken a side.
Before any wider community review, both parties should be allowed to read the neutral summary and identify factual errors. The summary should avoid unnecessary private details, especially details concerning health, sex, family, immigration, housing, finances, or trauma.
Phase 3 community review
If Phase 2 fails and the Grievant remains unsatisfied, the community may convene a review session. The purpose of the review is to determine whether a harm occurred, what restoration or protection is appropriate, and whether continued membership is compatible with the safety and integrity of the community.
Conflict review sessions should not be live streamed. They should not be treated as entertainment, spectacle, public denunciation, or ideological theater. The community may publish a short anonymized process note afterward only when doing so is useful for accountability and does not expose a harmed person or private details.
Where the matter is sensitive, the community may appoint a temporary review circle by lot or vote instead of exposing the full matter to every member. The review circle must be temporary, recallable, balanced where possible, and subject to conflict-of-interest limits. No permanent hierarchy is created by this function.
Evidentiary standards
Evidence presented must be firsthand, documented, or corroborated by a witness. Hearsay alone carries no weight. Screenshots, recordings, and written accounts are acceptable only if they can be reasonably authenticated and their source, date, and context are clear.
Critically: any existing power, wealth, dependency, or social status asymmetry between parties must be explicitly acknowledged during deliberation. Resources, social connections, institutional status, charisma, seniority, fame, and rhetorical skill must not be allowed to substitute for evidence or influence decisions of the jury/community.
A community review must not become a contest in charm, confidence, status, or storytelling. A person may sound calmer, smarter, more respectable, more educated, more practiced, or more persuasive without being more truthful. That kind of influence is not evidence. It is a form of power, and the community must learn to recognize it as such.
Where there is a power imbalance, the community should slow down and rely more heavily on facts that can be checked. Each party should have a clear and equal chance to be heard. The more charismatic party must not be treated as the more honest one. If the facts remain unclear, the community may impose temporary protective boundaries rather than pretending that persuasion alone has proven the case.
Power analysis is necessary, but it is not a substitute for fact finding. Where evidence is ambiguous, the community may take temporary protective action while declining to make a final finding. Permanent ostracism, public naming, or severe sanction should require clear evidence and a process that allows the responding party a meaningful chance to answer.
Retaliation is itself a separate harm. Threatening, punishing, excluding, surveilling, mocking, or materially harming a person because they raised a grievance, served as a witness, mediated, voted, or refused to participate in coercive conduct should be treated as a serious community violation.
Quorum
Each community is responsible for defining its own quorum threshold. It is recommended that communities establish this threshold by majority vote before it is needed, not during a conflict. A written record of the agreed quorum definition should be kept and made accessible to all members.
Suggested considerations when defining quorum: minimum percentage of total membership required to vote; whether absent members must be contacted and given a window to respond before a decision is finalized; and whether certain high-stakes decisions require a higher threshold than routine ones.
High-stakes decisions include ostracism, membership revocation, public naming, publication of allegations, disclosure of sensitive records, or warnings sent to other communities. These should require a higher quorum and a higher approval threshold than routine scheduling, mutual aid, or facilitation decisions.
Community as jury
Juries are considered to be the entire community except where privacy, safety, scale, conflicts of interest, or the wishes of the harmed person require a temporary review circle. When the entire community cannot convene, absent voting members must be contacted and given a reasonable opportunity to review the evidence and testimony before a final decision is made.
Jury decisions result in a binding community outcome. Restoration of the Grievant is required where restoration is possible. Restoration means, to the extent possible, returning the Grievant to the condition they were in before the harm occurred -- whether that takes the form of returned property, a public or private apology, correction of a false account, repayment, repair work, changed conduct, distance, or another concrete remedy appropriate to the nature of the transgression.
Admission of wrong-doing and apology may be part of restoration, but the community should not make coerced confession the sole path away from ostracism. The central question is whether the harm has been acknowledged in practice, whether the harmed person is protected, whether restoration has occurred where possible, and whether the responding member can remain without creating a continuing safety or integrity risk.
Should a member found responsible refuse restoration, retaliate, repeat the harm, deny the community's safety boundaries, or make continued participation unsafe, then the member may be ostracized from the community. Ostracism should be understood as separation from voluntary association, not harassment, stalking, threats, public cruelty, deprivation of necessities, or physical force.
Review after decision is permitted when new evidence appears, a serious process error is identified, a conflict of interest was concealed, the remedy proves impossible or disproportionate, or the harmed person requests a change to the restoration plan. Review should not be used to exhaust, punish, or pressure the Grievant.
Some harms cannot be meaningfully restored. Where the harm cannot be meaningfully restored, the community may still owe the harmed person protection, material support, documentation, public correction, separation from the person who caused harm, and long-term care.
Retaining community membership is also only an option when the responding party has not demonstrated a repeated pattern of similar harm, retaliation, deception, coercion, or refusal to respect community boundaries.
Structure and facilitation
There are no leaders in a Commonwealth community. There is no permanent hierarchy of any kind.
Meetings may be facilitated by a community member appointed by majority vote for that week only. Facilitators rotate weekly. The role of the facilitator is strictly logistical -- keeping meetings on track, ensuring all members seeking to voice their views have a turn, and moderating conflict resolution sessions. Facilitators hold no authority over decisions, votes, or community direction.
No member may serve as facilitator during a conflict resolution session in which they are a party, witness, close supporter of a party, likely beneficiary of a decision, or otherwise materially conflicted.
Facilitators may pause a meeting for safety, cooling off, translation, accessibility, disability accommodation, childcare needs, food, water, or rest. Pausing a meeting is not the same thing as deciding the matter.
Remaining considerations
Meeting disruption
If an individual or faction attempts to disrupt a weekly meeting, the response depends on the nature and severity of the disruption.
For immediate in-session disruption, the facilitator may ask the assembled members to pause, restate the meeting ground rules, or hold a snap vote to suspend or remove the disruptor for the remainder of that session only. A simple majority show of hands is sufficient for temporary removal from that session. This authority belongs to the assembled community, not to the facilitator personally.
Temporary removal should be used only to restore the meeting, prevent intimidation, or protect immediate safety. It should not be used to silence ordinary disagreement, anger from a harmed person, criticism of the Commonwealth, criticism of a facilitator, or ideological dispute made in good faith.
Repeat or coordinated disruption is a more serious matter and warrants the full conflict resolution process where that process can safely function. In such cases, the community itself may serve as the Grievant.
Coordinated bad-faith infiltration -- sometimes called "wrecking" in organizing history -- is the hardest case. Communities may wish to consider a cooling-off period before new members are eligible to vote or facilitate, or to treat coordinated disruption as grounds for an accelerated community-wide membership vote where the harm is already witnessed by the assembled community.
An accelerated track should still include a written statement of the alleged conduct, a chance for response where safe, conflict-of-interest limits, and a record of the decision. It should not become a tool for factional purges.
Each community should decide in advance whether and how membership may be revoked, and under what conditions a faster resolution track is warranted.
Serious harm and community limits
This question cannot be avoided. The Commonwealth rejects the legitimacy of criminal states and their carceral institutions. At the same time, a local community has no coercive power of its own. Ostracism is the strongest tool available. This creates a gap when a harm is serious enough that ostracism alone may be insufficient to protect members.
Immediate safety
Where there is immediate danger, ongoing violence, credible threat, medical emergency, sexual harm, stalking, coercive control, child abuse, elder abuse, weapon use, disappearance, or another urgent safety risk, the first task is safety. Members should help the harmed person reach a safe place, medical care, trusted people, emergency support, or outside advocacy chosen by that person.
The community must not require the harmed person to enter direct resolution, mediation, or a community hearing before receiving support. The harmed person does not owe the community a complete account before the community helps with immediate safety.
Temporary separation of the accused member may be used immediately where necessary to protect safety. Temporary separation is not a final finding. It is a protective boundary pending further process, outside accountability, or the harmed person's chosen path.
Law enforcement and outside systems
The Commonwealth condemns existing law enforcement institutions as a militant enforcement arm of a criminal state. At the same time, the community will not punish a harmed person for contacting law enforcement, medical providers, lawyers, shelters, hotlines, journalists, family, friends, unions, tenant groups, religious communities, or other outside support.
The community should not collectively contact law enforcement over the objection of the harmed person unless there is an immediate and specific risk to life or serious bodily safety that cannot be addressed otherwise. Even then, members should use the least harmful available intervention and document why they believed the action was necessary.
If a member contacts law enforcement in their personal capacity after serious harm, that action alone should not affect their standing in the community. Any other position would turn anti-state politics into coercion against the harmed person.
Documentation for serious incidents
The community should maintain a careful documentation practice for serious incidents when the harmed person consents or when documentation is necessary to protect others from an immediate risk. Documentation should identify who made the record, when it was made, what was directly observed, what was reported, what evidence exists, who has access, and when review or deletion will occur.
Documentation should not be used to pressure the harmed person, expose them, create rumors, or build spectacle. The purpose is protection, restoration where possible, pattern recognition, and accountability.
Questions for community discussion
1. What safety resources exist near this community that do not require police contact?
2. Who can provide transportation, shelter, food, translation, childcare, disability access, medical support, or companionship during a crisis?
3. What records should be kept for serious incidents, who may access them, and when should they be deleted?
4. Under what narrow conditions may the community warn other members or communities about a person who presents a credible safety risk?
5. How does the community protect itself from being used as a shield by someone who has committed serious harm and wishes to avoid outside accountability?
6. How does the community prevent its own process from becoming retaliation, spectacle, factional struggle, or a second harm to the person already harmed?
Proposed principles to guide discussion
Whatever position the community arrives at, the following principles are proposed as a starting point:
First, in matters of conflict resolution, the safety and personal choices of a community member who has been harmed by another member are to take precedence over the community's institutional position on law enforcement.
Second, the community will not pressure a harmed member either toward or away from contacting law enforcement. Such pressure, in either direction, is itself a form of coercion.
Third, in cases of serious harm, the community may use immediate temporary separation of the accused without waiting for the full three-phase conflict resolution process, on the basis that the standard process was designed for restorable interpersonal conflict, not serious danger.
Fourth, the community's condemnation of state institutions does not extend to abandoning its own members in moments of serious danger.
Fifth, a community that cannot protect a harmed person without controlling them has not yet built a liberatory practice.
A note on honesty
Any community that cannot name the limits of its own power is not being honest with its members. This community has real limits. Naming them is not a weakness -- it is a precondition for trust.
One rule throughout
Preserve continuity where continuity protects life, and break continuity where continuity protects domination.