Embassy Network: Design Patterns and Do-ocracy

The published design patterns and do-ocracy governance model of the Embassy Network, a network of urban co-living houses that ran a famous 8-month live-in governance experiment in 2013, rotating through four different decision-making structures.

The Embassy Network is a network of place-based urban co-living communities that emerged in the early 2010s, anchored by Embassy SF in San Francisco and including the Red Victorian, Rainbow Mansion, Canopy, and a number of houses in Berlin and elsewhere. Houses that identify as Embassies are autonomous and independently run, but share a working philosophy: they are participatory platforms for creativity, co-designed governance, and sharing, where residents prototype new ways of doing things and share the experiments back with the outside world.

The constitutional document for Embassy houses is distributed across two main bodies of work.

The first is Jessy Kate Schingler's published design-pattern essay (Medium, February 2016), which reads as a practical constitution for new houses. Key patterns:

• Place, then people. Start with a small founding group of 2 to 4, select a physical place, then recruit the rest. Recruiting people first leads to a group that cannot agree on a building.
• Design for sharing. Food bought centrally, residents pay a monthly food fee, the kitchen is shared with no possession of ingredients. At Embassy SF, $200 per resident per month, $2,500 to $3,000 monthly food budget, 15 to 20 people fed per day.
• Space as platform. 40 to 60% common space relative to total square footage. Below that ratio, the unexpected interactions stop happening.
• Anchor in the culture. Roughly 65% long-term residents and 35% guests is the ratio that holds the culture stable while new energy still enters.
• Be big enough. Below 7 bedrooms, average occupancy is too low for emergent social dynamics.
• Design for surplus. Don't budget to break even; budget to more than break even, and use the surplus as an engine of creativity.
• Do-ocracy. Take action, but only with transparency, communication, and reversibility. Combined with regular in-person meetings and a commitment to transparency, this is the operational governance model that most Embassy houses adopted.

The second body is the Embassy SF governance experiment of 2013. For 8 months, all 14 residents opted into a live-in experiment in which the community rotated through 4 different governance structures (each tested for several months) and measured community happiness through each. Results from this experiment are documented at embassygovernance.space. The structure that the community settled on after the experiment was a form of do-ocracy with transparency commitments and regular in-person check-ins.

For a researcher, the Embassy Network is one of the few cases where a co-living community built and published a constitution as design-pattern language rather than as legal text, and one of the only cases anywhere of a community that ran a controlled, opt-in, multi-month experiment to test which governance structure they would adopt.

Living examples and entry points for community builders

If your community is sitting with questions about how to get things done without waiting for consensus on every small decision, here is what others have done and where the door is.

Embassy SF (San Francisco) has been running weekly community dinners, rotating stewardships, and do-ocracy since 2012. It is one of the longest-running urban coliving houses in the US and has outlasted many similar experiments. The house treats weekly dinner not as a social nicety but as the connective tissue of the community. Embassy Berlin operates with the same pattern library but has adapted it to a different legal and cultural context, which is itself a useful data point: the patterns are portable, but they need local translation.

Beyond the Embassy Network, Noisebridge (San Francisco) is probably the most documented do-ocracy in practice. It is a hackerspace, not a home, but its implementation of do-ocracy is detailed, public, and has been stress-tested through years of conflict and recovery. Wikimedia Commons operates something adjacent at a much larger scale: distributed stewardship where motivated contributors take ownership of specific domains without central approval.

For adjacent applications, Roam and Common have borrowed elements of the coliving design pattern without the political or intentional community framing. They are closer to co-living-as-product, but they show how the operational patterns (shared meals, rotating responsibilities, consent-based house norms) translate into more commercial contexts. The Guild operates similarly in the UK. None of these are the Embassy Network, but watching how the patterns land in different contexts is useful if you are designing your own version.

Where the door is:

• The Embassy Network has a handbook online. It is worth reading not to copy it but to see what they thought was worth writing down.
• Noisebridge's do-ocracy wiki is probably the clearest written explanation of how do-ocracy actually functions in practice, including its failure modes.
• If you want to try do-ocracy before committing to it as a governance model, start with one domain: kitchen maintenance, or event coordination. Give one person the authority to act and see what happens.
• Ask your group: what decisions do we currently make by consensus that could just be done by whoever cares enough to do them?

One caution worth sitting with: do-ocracy works when the people who act also listen. When a small, motivated group captures all decisions simply because they show up and others don't, you end up with informal oligarchy dressed as participation. The Embassy Network has written about this directly. If you notice that the same three people are making every call, that is a signal worth paying attention to before it calcifies.