The Open Structure

No PermissionNeeded

There is no chain of command here, no membership roll, and nobody whose approval you have to get. If you see work that needs doing, that is the entire authorization process.

What decentralized actually means here

Most organizations say "grassroots" and mean a pyramid with a friendlier logo. There is still someone at the top approving messaging, still a staff whose position depends on staying in favor, still a volunteer tier waiting to be told what to do.

That is not what this is. Kill the Precedent is a shared body of research, curricula, language, and evidence that anyone can pick up and use. There is no application. There is no onboarding call. There is no one who can revoke your participation, because nobody granted it in the first place.

You work as much or as little as you want, as often or as seldom as you want. You can put in six months and disappear. You can do one thing, once, and never do another. Nobody is owed an explanation, because nobody was owed the work.

The tenets

01

You do not need permission

Write it, print it, host it, say it. No one signs off. The work is the proposal and the proposal is the work.

02

You keep your own credit

What you build stays attached to your name. This is not a place where the organization absorbs your labor and prints its own logo on it.

03

You carry your own conduct

Your words are yours. Your choices are yours. Nobody else answers for them, and you do not answer for anybody else's.

04

There is no quota and no clock

No hours. No check-ins. No one measuring whether you have contributed enough to still belong. Belonging was never conditional.

05

Reputation is the only currency

Nobody gets a title. Good work becomes visible because it is good, and it travels with the person who did it. That is the whole promotion system.

06

Nobody speaks for everybody

People here arrive from different politics, faiths, and reasons. There is no line to hold. Agreement on the problem is not agreement on everything.

"You can't say that, it makes us look bad" is a sentence we have chosen not to own.

Why the freedom is the point, not the compromise

The systems this work exists to confront run on the opposite principle. A caseworker follows a policy that produces a harm and answers, truthfully, that they were following policy. An officer acts inside a doctrine built to make individual answerability disappear. Everyone is inside a structure and no one is responsible.

An organization built the same way would inherit the same disease. So this one is built inside out: the structure holds nothing, and each person holds everything about themselves. If you get something right, it is because you got it right. If you get something wrong, there is no policy to hide behind and no institution absorbing the blame on your behalf.

That is not a loophole in the design. That is the argument, practiced instead of preached.

What this is and is not

This is

  • A shared research and curriculum library
  • People acting under their own names
  • Local groups run entirely by the people in them
  • Work you can take, adapt, print, and use
  • Credit that stays with whoever earned it

This is not

  • A membership organization
  • A staff with a volunteer tier underneath it
  • A place that speaks for you
  • A place you can be expelled from
  • A place that will ever ask what you've done lately

One line, and it is short. Violence is not part of this. Not as tactic, not as threat, not as a thing we wink at. It is not a rule imposed on you — it is that the entire case rests on being the party that did not have to hurt anyone in order to be right.

Start where you are

Pick something up. Start a node in your area. Print a stack and hand it out. Read the curricula and teach one person what is in them. Nobody is going to ask you to, and nobody is going to thank you for waiting.

Start a node See what needs doing Terms of participation