Project
What bounded public project is this Circle responsible for?
SERVICE & PARTICIPATION
What Is a Public Action Circle?
A bounded, public, lawful, nonviolent, receipt-producing assembly for one visible project at a time—with task authority that ends when the task ends.
QUICK ANSWER
In one sentence
A bounded, public, lawful, nonviolent, receipt-producing assembly for one visible project at a time—with task authority that ends when the task ends.
THE CONTROLLING CLAIM
THE CIRCLE EXISTS TO BUILD THE THING. NOT TO BECOME ANOTHER THRONE.
Meetings are easy. Institutions are easy, too, once the meeting learns how to keep itself alive. Titles harden. Access narrows. The project becomes the excuse for the structure that was supposed to serve it. A Public Action Circle starts from the opposite pressure: one visible problem, one bounded piece of work, temporary task authority, a receipt, and a door out.
TRUTH BOUNDARY
OECD citizen-participation guidance, Ostrom-related commons research, cooperative principles, and people-centred accountability sources support components such as transparent participation, method selection, member control, local capacity, and accountability. The 60-minute Action Circle format is a Ministry design and is not presented as an empirically validated or universally appropriate governance model.
01 — PUBLIC
No secret membership is required to understand what the Circle is doing.
The project, bounded objective, decision route, and resulting artifact should be visible enough for an affected person to understand what authority the Circle claims. Public does not mean publishing private participant data. It means the work cannot depend on a hidden command structure.
OECD participation guidance emphasizes choosing participation methods deliberately and communicating the process; the Circle adopts that demand for inspectability.
02 — BOUNDED
One project is enough.
A Circle is not a government in waiting. It exists to produce or maintain a specific public artifact or service: a guide, translation, cleanup, source index, accessibility repair, meeting calendar, archive package, skill session, or other lawful bounded project.
The smaller scope is not aesthetic minimalism. It keeps authority attached to the task instead of allowing the task to become a pretext for permanent rank.
03 — GOVERNANCE
Authority follows the task and dissolves when the task ends.
Research on commons governance and cooperative organization shows that shared resources can be managed through institutional arrangements other than a single external sovereign or purely individual ownership, under some conditions. The Ministry does not convert that into a promise that every Circle will govern well.
The Circle therefore records who decides what for this task, how that decision can be reviewed, and when the temporary role ends.
04 — SIXTY MINUTES
Meet only long enough to produce the next inspectable state.
10 minutes — What is broken?
10 minutes — What evidence do we have?
10 minutes — What is the smallest useful artifact?
20 minutes — Build or perform the bounded work.
5 minutes — Assign verification.
5 minutes — Record receipt, handoff, and next test.
05 — ACTION CIRCLE RECEIPT
Leave enough structure for the next person.
Need
What verified need or failure does the project address?
Evidence
What sources or observations justify the current work?
Roles
Which roles are necessary for this task, and what private data can be omitted?
Artifact
What usable thing exists at the end of the session?
Decision authority
Who can decide what for this bounded task?
Review
How can the decision or artifact be challenged and corrected?
Failure
What did not work?
Handoff
Who can continue without the current facilitator?
Exit
How can a participant leave without unrelated retaliation?
Next meeting
Is another meeting actually necessary?
COMPETING INTERPRETATIONS
Keep the argument capable of surviving disagreement.
- Longer-lived organizations sometimes need stable roles, legal officers, fiduciary duties, or continuity that cannot dissolve after every task.
- Open meetings can reproduce dominance by the most available, confident, or resourced participants; participation design requires active attention to exclusion and facilitation.
- A bounded Circle is appropriate for some public projects, not emergency command, confidential casework, regulated professional decisions, or tasks requiring specialized legal authority.
UNKNOWNS
Do not make certainty out of the missing piece.
- The Ministry has not conducted controlled research showing that the 60-minute format outperforms other meeting structures.
- Local law, venue rules, safeguarding requirements, or partner governance may require adaptations.
- Future use may show that some projects need a multi-session charter rather than a single-session build rhythm.
SOURCE TRAIL
Follow the record.
- MFTAC-SRC-0058 OECD — Guidelines for Citizen Participation Processes
- MFTAC-SRC-0027 Nobel Prize — Economic Governance and the Commons
- MFTAC-SRC-0028 International Labour Organization — Recommendation 193 and cooperatives
- MFTAC-SRC-0052 Core Humanitarian Standard on Quality and Accountability — 2024 edition
RELATED READING
CORRECTION RECEIPT
Publication status: published 2026-08-30. No post-publication correction is recorded in this release. A publication-status statement is not itself a correction. If a consequential claim changes, the Correction Ledger must preserve what changed, why it changed, which Source IDs were affected, and which dependent pages were reviewed.
THE CIRCLE EXISTS TO BUILD THE THING. NOT TO BECOME ANOTHER THRONE.