# MOC · Voluntary Federation Governance Hub for one recurring problem: **how do bodies that will not coerce their members stay together?** > [!warning] On the church / open-source analogy > The convergence between mid-century church polity and modern open source foundation governance is **independent invention on a shared problem** — not influence in either direction. Use it to generate hypotheses. Do not use it as evidence. ## Core notes - [[Perm · A covenant with no enforcement decays once shared custom erodes]] - [[Perm · Absence of enforcement actions cannot distinguish unnecessary from impossible]] - [[Perm · Exit rights discipline an institution only when exit is costly]] - [[Perm · Governance conflicts are semantic before they are substantive]] - [[Perm · Institutional caricature outlives the conditions that produced it]] - [[Perm · Founding documents encode their authors fears more reliably than successors needs]] ## Source cases | Case | Material | |---|---| | United Church of Christ, 1957–61 | [[2026-07-25 The United Church of Christ — Reading Notes]] · [[Horton — The United Church of Christ — Source Passages]] · [[MOC · United Church of Christ]] | | Commons governance theory | Ostrom, *Governing the Commons* (1990) — graduated sanctions and monitoring are the two design principles the UCC polity lacks | | Open source foundations | Linux Foundation / CNCF / ASF governance material; FAIR under the Linux Foundation; OpenSearch fork-to-foundation | | Forking as governance | Mitchell Baker, *The Ethos of Open Source*; Raymond, *The Cathedral and the Bazaar* — "Who gets to make binding decisions about a project?" | | Implicit feudalism | Nathan Schneider, *Governable Spaces* (Sustain ep. 222) | | Self-governance principles | Greg Bloom, Principles of Governing Open Source Commons | ## Contrast case [[Perm · Charismatic communities blur doctrinal and governance boundaries]] — the inverse failure. The NAR collapses theology into authority structure; the UCC deliberately refuses to let any structure claim theological finality. Same axis, opposite ends. See [[NAR and Charismatic Authority Critique MOC]]. ## Open questions - What would an enforcement mechanism compatible with non-coercive theology even look like? - Is a covenant a weaker contract, or a different kind of thing? - Does unenforced-norm decay have empirical support outside single cases? - Where does the fourth option — binding decisions with strong minority protections and accessible revision — actually get used, and does it work?