Type: Report
The Missing Middle
Modern society has optimized for two scales of human organization: the individual and the crowd. We have robust infrastructure for individual expression (social media profiles, personal bank accounts, voting booths) and for mass coordination (corporations, nation-states, global markets). But between these extremes lies a vast, underserved territory — the small group. The crew. The circle of people you trust enough to build something real with.
Richard D. Bartlett, co-founder of Loomio, Enspiral, and The Hum, calls this gap "the missing middle." In late 2018, he published a proposal for a framework called microsolidarity — a set of practices and patterns for building mutual support structures at the scale where humans actually form trust: small groups of three to eight people, nested within larger communities of thirty to two hundred.
The framework has since grown into an international practice network, influencing cooperative movements, community organizing, and — increasingly — the design of DAOs and onchain coordination systems. For anyone working on public goods funding, microsolidarity offers a critical insight: large-scale coordination does not emerge from large-scale systems. It emerges from small-scale trust, deliberately structured and carefully scaled.
The Fractal Model
Microsolidarity proposes a fractal organizational model with five nested scales. Each scale has distinct properties, and the health of the larger scales depends entirely on the health of the smaller ones.
Self
The innermost scale. Bartlett describes the self not as a singular identity but as "a tight network of overlapping identities who share custody of this body we call Me." This is not mere philosophy — it has practical implications. Effective participation in any group begins with self-awareness: understanding your own needs, capacities, triggers, and commitments. Microsolidarity practices at this scale include journaling, meditation, and structured reflection — the inner work that makes outer coordination possible.
Dyad
A relationship of two. Bartlett makes a striking claim: imagine society as an enormous structure, and the only building blocks are dyads. Each dyad exists in one of two states — domination or partnership. The quality of every larger structure is determined by the quality of its dyads.
This is not abstract. In any organization, the one-on-one relationships between members are the foundation on which everything else rests. When dyads are characterized by partnership — mutual respect, honest communication, shared vulnerability — the group thrives. When dyads fall into domination — power imbalance, withholding, manipulation — the group decays from within.
Microsolidarity practices at this scale include regular one-on-one check-ins, peer coaching, and structured partnership rituals. These are not optional niceties — they are load-bearing infrastructure.
Crew
This is the scale where microsolidarity's distinctive contribution is most visible. A crew is a group of three to eight people — small enough to fit around a dinner table, large enough to accomplish meaningful work. This is roughly the size of a nuclear family, a band, a founding team, or a special operations unit.
The size is critical. Below three people, the group lacks the diversity of perspective needed for resilience. Above eight, the coordination costs begin to outweigh the benefits of inclusion. Within this range, something remarkable happens: the group can stay highly coordinated with minimal explicit rules and roles, while being large enough that its collective impact justifies the cost of collaboration.
Bartlett draws on decades of research into group dynamics, from Bruce Tuckman's stages of group development to J. Richard Hackman's studies of team effectiveness. But the microsolidarity contribution is not just analytical — it is practical. The framework provides specific patterns for forming crews, running meetings, navigating conflict, and evolving the group's purpose over time.
A crew is not a committee, a working group, or a team. It is a long-term set of relationships oriented toward a shared purpose, combining emotional intimacy with economic collaboration. The key distinction is that microsolidarity crews start with relational depth and build toward productive output — the inverse of most professional contexts, where people are thrown together around a task and expected to develop trust as a byproduct.
Congregation
Between thirty and two hundred people, a congregation is small enough that most members can know each other's name but large enough to sustain multiple crews. This is the scale of a village, a church community, a cooperative network, or a mid-sized DAO.
The congregation is where microsolidarity's fractal structure becomes visible. A healthy congregation is not a single monolithic group — it is a network of crews, each with its own purpose, connected through shared values, overlapping membership, and collective rituals. The congregation provides the context within which crews form, evolve, and sometimes dissolve. It holds the institutional memory, the shared culture, and the resource pool that individual crews draw on.
Bartlett identifies several design patterns for healthy congregations: regular whole-group gatherings that build shared identity; transparent processes for crew formation; participatory budgeting that distributes resources across crews; and explicit mechanisms for conflict resolution that prevent interpersonal tensions from destabilizing the larger network.
Congregation of Congregations
The outermost scale: a network of congregations connected through shared protocols, values, and communication channels. This is the scale of a movement, a federation, or an ecosystem. The microsolidarity network itself operates at this scale — a loose affiliation of mutual-aid communities around the world, each running its own experiments in small-group coordination.
Dunbar's Number and Why Scale Matters
The microsolidarity framework is grounded in Robin Dunbar's research on the cognitive limits of human social organization. Dunbar, a British anthropologist, proposed in 1993 that humans can maintain stable relationships with approximately 150 people — a limit determined by the size of the neocortex. Below this threshold, coordination can rely on personal knowledge and trust. Above it, formal structures (bureaucracy, hierarchy, codified rules) become necessary.
Dunbar's research identifies a nested structure of social groupings that maps remarkably well onto microsolidarity's scales:
- 5 people: intimate support group (close friends, confidants)
- 15 people: sympathy group (people whose death would devastate you)
- 50 people: close friends (people you might invite to a large dinner party)
- 150 people: meaningful relationships (people you can maintain a reciprocal relationship with)
Beyond 150, trust becomes institutional rather than personal. You do not trust your bank because you know the teller personally — you trust it because of regulatory frameworks, deposit insurance, and brand reputation. This transition from personal to institutional trust is where most coordination systems focus their efforts.
Microsolidarity's insight is that the transition does not have to be abrupt. By deliberately cultivating trust at each nested scale — dyad, crew, congregation — an organization can extend the benefits of personal trust well beyond what individual cognitive limits would allow. Each crew member knows and trusts seven other people deeply. Each of those people is in other crews. The network of overlapping crews creates a web of trust that covers the entire congregation — not because everyone knows everyone, but because everyone is connected through trusted intermediaries.
This is profoundly relevant for DAOs, which routinely struggle with the gap between their ambitions (global coordination) and their social reality (a Discord server where most members are strangers to each other).
Real-World Proof Points
Microsolidarity is not merely theoretical. It draws on and has influenced several real-world organizations that have operated at significant scale for extended periods.
Enspiral
Enspiral is a New Zealand-based collective that has operated since 2010, fluctuating around 150-200 members. It is perhaps the most well-documented experiment in non-hierarchical organizational design at the congregation scale. Enspiral has incubated multiple social enterprises, including Loomio (collaborative decision-making software), and has practiced participatory budgeting, self-managing teams, and distributed governance for over a decade.
Enspiral's structure maps directly onto the microsolidarity model. The collective (congregation) supports approximately ten to twenty ventures and working groups (crews), each focused on a specific purpose. Members participate in multiple crews simultaneously, creating the overlapping trust networks that give the congregation its resilience. An annual retreat, a coworking space, and a shared digital infrastructure provide the connective tissue.
Critically, Enspiral's experience demonstrates both the power and the fragility of this model. The collective has gone through multiple crises — leadership burnout, financial strain, identity conflicts — and has survived by returning to its small-group foundations. When the congregation-level structures fail, the crews hold. When crews fragment, the dyads hold. The fractal structure provides graceful degradation.
Loomio
Loomio, the collaborative decision-making platform that emerged from Enspiral, is itself a microsolidarity artifact. Born from the experience of Occupy Wellington in the early 2010s, Loomio was designed to solve a specific coordination problem: how do small groups make decisions together without either authoritarian control or endless consensus processes?
The tool implements several microsolidarity principles in software: proposals that make individual positions visible to the group, time-boxed discussions that prevent decision fatigue, and graduated consent models that distinguish between enthusiastic support, passive agreement, and active objection. Loomio has been used by governments, cooperatives, and community organizations worldwide.
The Hum
The Hum is Bartlett's management consultancy for organizations without managers. Drawing on the microsolidarity framework and Bartlett's patterns for decentralized organizing, The Hum works with teams and organizations navigating the challenges of self-management: distributed decision-making, shared leadership, peer accountability, power dynamics, and conflict resolution.
The Hum's work demonstrates that microsolidarity is not just a community-building framework — it is an organizational design methodology applicable to any group attempting to coordinate without traditional hierarchy.
Microsolidarity Meets DAOs
The DAO ecosystem has spent years grappling with problems that microsolidarity directly addresses. Most DAOs are organized at two scales: the individual token holder and the entire DAO. This binary structure produces predictable pathologies.
Voter apathy. When the only way to participate is to vote on proposals that affect thousands of people, most individuals rationally disengage. The scale mismatch between individual agency and collective outcome produces passivity.
Governance capture. Without intermediate structures, DAOs are vulnerable to capture by small groups of whales or well-organized factions. The absence of crew-level organization means that most members lack the social infrastructure to coordinate a response.
Trust deficits. DAOs ask strangers to manage shared treasuries, make collective decisions, and hold each other accountable. Without the trust built through small-group interaction, these activities feel risky and abstract.
Contributor burnout. Without crew-level support structures, active contributors bear disproportionate coordination costs. They are simultaneously doing the work, managing relationships, navigating governance, and maintaining their own wellbeing — without the intimate support group that makes sustained effort possible.
Microsolidarity offers specific remedies for each of these pathologies:
Crews as governance units. Rather than asking individuals to vote on every proposal, DAOs can delegate certain decision-making authority to crews — small groups with domain expertise and established trust. This is not representative democracy (crews are not elected) but something closer to sociocracy: nested circles of competence, each with clear scope and transparent processes.
Onboarding through dyads. New DAO members can be paired with experienced members in structured dyadic relationships — not just buddies or mentors, but genuine partnerships with reciprocal commitments. This transforms onboarding from an information problem (how do I learn the tools?) into a relational problem (who can I trust to help me navigate this community?).
Congregational rituals for cohesion. Regular whole-DAO gatherings — town halls, retrospectives, celebrations — build the shared identity that makes governance participation feel meaningful. These are not optional community management activities; they are load-bearing governance infrastructure.
Participatory budgeting at crew scale. Rather than allocating entire treasury budgets through token-weighted voting, DAOs can distribute resources to crews through participatory budgeting processes, allowing small groups to make allocation decisions within their domains. This is how Enspiral has operated for years, and it maps naturally onto onchain mechanisms like quadratic funding and conviction voting.
From Trust to Coordination to Capital
The microsolidarity framework reveals a progression that is often invisible in mechanism design discussions: trust precedes coordination, and coordination precedes capital allocation.
Most public goods funding mechanisms begin with capital allocation — how should we distribute this pool of money? — and work backward toward coordination and trust. Quadratic funding assumes that participants can express genuine preferences. Retroactive funding assumes that evaluators can assess impact honestly. Direct grants assume that allocators have sufficient knowledge and judgment. But all of these assumptions rest on social foundations that the mechanisms themselves do not create.
Microsolidarity suggests inverting the order. Start with trust: create small groups where people develop genuine relationships, mutual understanding, and shared commitment. Then coordination: use the trust built in small groups to tackle progressively larger coordination challenges. Then capital allocation: deploy funding mechanisms within a social context where participants have the relational infrastructure to use them well.
This does not mean abandoning formal mechanisms in favor of informal trust networks. It means recognizing that mechanisms work better when they are embedded in social contexts characterized by trust. A quadratic funding round conducted within a community of microsolidarity crews — where participants know each other, understand the projects, and have established norms of honest signaling — will produce better outcomes than the same mechanism deployed among anonymous strangers.
Gift circles, one of the mechanisms most aligned with microsolidarity principles, make this explicit. In a gift circle, participants share needs and offers in a small-group setting, and resources flow through relational channels rather than market mechanisms. The "efficiency" of a gift circle is low by market standards, but the trust generated is high — and that trust becomes the foundation for more sophisticated coordination.
Implications for Mechanism Design
If microsolidarity's insights are taken seriously, several implications follow for the design of public goods funding mechanisms:
1. Design for nested scales. Mechanisms should not assume a flat population of individuals. They should accommodate and encourage intermediate structures — teams, crews, working groups — that bridge the gap between individual participants and the collective.
2. Invest in relational infrastructure. Funding mechanisms should allocate resources not just to projects but to the relational infrastructure that makes good project selection possible. This includes community gatherings, peer learning programs, structured onboarding, and conflict resolution processes.
3. Combine formal and relational mechanisms. The most effective allocation systems will combine formal mechanisms (quadratic funding, conviction voting) with relational practices (crew-based deliberation, dyadic peer review). Neither alone is sufficient.
4. Respect Dunbar's limits. Mechanisms that require participants to evaluate hundreds of projects are asking humans to do something their brains are not designed for. Better designs decompose the evaluation task into smaller units that match human cognitive capacities — crew-level assessments that aggregate into community-level allocations.
5. Measure trust, not just outcomes. The health of a coordination system cannot be assessed solely by its outputs (money allocated, projects funded). The quality of relationships within the system — measured by participation rates, contributor retention, conflict resolution effectiveness, and member satisfaction — is an equally important indicator.
Conclusion: Small Groups, Big Futures
The history of human coordination is, in many ways, a history of small groups. Families, bands, guilds, crews, congregations — the unit of effective action has always been a group small enough for trust and large enough for impact. Modernity's mistake was assuming that formal institutions could replace these organic structures. The result is a coordination landscape optimized for scale but impoverished in trust.
Microsolidarity does not reject scale. It proposes a different path to it: scale built from the bottom up, through nested layers of trust, rather than imposed from the top down through institutional authority. The fractal model — dyads composing into crews, crews composing into congregations, congregations composing into networks — offers a blueprint for coordination that is simultaneously intimate and expansive.
For the DAO ecosystem and the public goods funding community, the message is clear: the missing piece is not a better voting mechanism or a more sophisticated allocation algorithm. The missing piece is the social infrastructure that makes any mechanism work — the crews, the dyads, the shared meals, the honest conversations, the reciprocal commitments that transform a collection of strangers into a community capable of collective action.
Build the small groups first. The large-scale coordination will follow.
Richard Bartlett discussed microsolidarity and its applications to coordination on GreenPill (S4, Ep.15). For more on the framework, visit microsolidarity.cc.
