During the editing process I got a couple of great replies to my final question: “Who do you know doing collaborative governance with something other than written agreements?”

From Billy Matheson: “I think Zaid Hassan’s Social Labs Revolution is interesting in suggesting a basic ‘pattern’ or ‘heuristic’ rather than “rules for doing social labs”. I also really like Tonya Surman’s work on constellation governance (pdf) which I think is trying to deal with some of these questions.”

And from Hailey Cooperrider: “Predictably, I want to pull on the futures and co-imagination thread. I’ve recently learned that this piece by Polak is influential, in which he argues that a healthy community has a robust “image of the future (pdf)” (which is not in any sense a plan or a hard agreement). To answer the prompt more directly, the newer movement of “experiential futures” and “design fiction” seeks to help communities develop images of the future through more tangible, multi-sensory, object-based and narrative-led ways of experiencing possible futures.”