Skip to content

Role & Circle

Circles

A "Circle" is a space for organizing Roles, Policies and sub-Circles around a common purpose.

The visibility of a circle determine who have access to its content.

  • a Public circle means that the circle content is publicly accessible.
  • a Private circle means that only members of an organisation has access to it.
  • a Secret circle means only roles inside that circle has access to it.

Roles

From the Holacracy definition, a "Role" is an organisational construct that a person can fill and then energize on behalf of the Organisation. Whoever fills a Role is a "Role Lead" for that Role.

A Role definition consists of a descriptive name and one or more of the following:

  1. a "Purpose", which is a capacity, potential, or goal that the Role will pursue or express.
  2. one or more "Domains", which are assets, processes, or other things the Role may exclusively control and regulate as its property, for its Purpose.
  3. one or more "Accountabilities", which are ongoing activities the Role will manage and enact in service of other Roles or to support its Purpose.

A Role may also hold "Policies", which are grants or constraints of authority, or special rules that apply within that Role.

Membership

In Fractale, you can be part of an organisation in different ways that characterized different type of membership. Your membership affects your rights and what resources you can access inside it.

The membership of an user can be one of the following:

  • Guest: When an user is invited to an organisation, and do not play any specific role, they will be set up as a Guest. Guest have limited access rights.
  • Member: If you play at least one role in an organisation, you will be automatically granted as Member. The rights of a Member are determined by the role they play.
  • Owner: When you create a new organisation, you are automatically set up as an Owner of this organisation. Owners have the maximal level authority .

Authority

In addition to membership, a user can have one or several roles in a organisation. Each role is defined with a level of authority that affect the rights and the resources accessible by the role leader.

The authority of a role can be one of the following:

Peer

A Peer role has the following rights within its circle:

  • creation of tensions and comments.
  • edit its own tensions.
  • close its own tensions.
  • propose draft for mandates edition.

Coordinator

A Coordinator role has the same rights of a Peer plus the following rights within its circle (the circle where the role is defined):

  • invite members
  • change tension type.
  • edit tension labels.
  • edit tension assignees.
  • move tensions.
  • creation of roles and sub-circles.
  • edit circles and roles properties.
  • publish mandate modifications.

Scope of authority

The authority given by a role (and so the rights that a given user has with this authority) exists in a scope delimited by circles, as follows:

  • If a circle has no Coordinator role, then all Coordinators in parent circles have authority on that circle (ie can edit it).
  • if a circle has one or more Coordo roles, only they (+ the Owner role) can edit that circle.

Governance

Circles are defined with a governance mode among: - Coordinated - Agile

The Coordinated mode is the one used by default when creating a circle, but this remains editable at creation or afterwards. It corresponds to the difference in authority between the Peer and Coordinator specified in the previous section.

The Agile model allows the creation of circles in which the Peer role has the same authority as the Coordinators within the circle. This is useful when you want to give extended rights to members in a circle without them being a coordinator within the organization.