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Welcome to Fractale documentation

Fractale (fractale.co) is a platform for self-organisation. That means a shift from pyramidal management with subordination relationships towards fractal circles with relationships based on trust and peer to peer commitment.

It is designed around the concept that an organisation can be represented as a tree and should follow principles of transparency, governance decentralization and authority distribution. A tree divides in branches and form leaves, likewise an organisation divides in Circles that can have Roles. Both, circles and roles have an associated descriptive document, called Mandate, intended to define its purpose and operating rules. Finally, the communication inside the organisation is done through Tensions, and make the link between users and organisations. You can think of a tension as an email, but more structured and more powerful.

The platform offers a radical transparency of the structure of the organisation, allows members to communicate through a tensions publishing system, and organisations to evolve. Its goal is to facilitate organisations to achieve their goals through mutual aid and collective intelligence.

To do so, the platform focus on three core design principles:

  • Transparency: each member of an organisation is able to see the organisation structure and its components according to their roles: circles, roles, mandates, tensions and journals.
  • Tension-driven decision making: Each member of the organisation can communicate through tensions who can be collectively discussed in order to be solved.
  • Adaptation: organisations are dynamic and evolve through a dialogue between the current institutions and the tensions. This translates by the ability to modify the structure of the organisation incrementally.

Organisations are seen like graphs, or trees, which are akin to living entities and where their members can intuitively visit them, and interact with, in order to:

  • Quickly understand who is doing what.
  • Quickly understand what is to be done.
  • Quickly detect and respond to tensions.
  • Quickly find the right people to contact to get information.
  • Facilitate the on-boarding flow of newcomers.
  • Be robust to growth and reorganisation.

It is inspired by several ideas and initiatives 1:

  • Collaborative tool for developer such as Gitlab and Github.
  • The way living organism are designed, made up of organs that are simultaneously interdependent and autonomous but act towards a common purpose and capable of adaptation according to inner and outer tensions.
  • And some real-life experiences.

You are welcome to try and build your organisation on Fractale. We invite you to contact us is you need help or have questions. Feedback are extremly important for us in order to drive the platform in accordance to real-word needs and deliver the best experience to improve collective intelligence.

Finally, Fractale is a free and open-source project licensed under AGPLv3. Our repository is available and open to contribution on Github: https://github.com/fractal6.

  1. But note that we do not pretend to conform to any of this solution and rather aims to be adaptable to a plurality of organisational approaches. ↩