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Sphere · Whitepaper

Circles and Spheres

Groups and group management is one of the key functionalities of the Trust-Based Social Network. While the behavior of groups can be customized and extended, some basic functionality is provided as defaults.

Circles — Basic Group Models

Section titled “Circles — Basic Group Models”

Circles describe common structures for organizing groups of people. They are system entities that can take actions and interact with the system similar to individual users. Each circle has a set of members and can give these members special roles.

Standard Circle Procedures

Section titled “Standard Circle Procedures”

Every Circle must define procedures for:

  • Circle creation
  • Circle dissolution
  • Member addition
  • Member removal
  • Collective signature
  • Custom procedures

Default Circle Types

Section titled “Default Circle Types”
  • Autocratic Circle: One member is the circle leader and has sole control over the circle and its decisions
  • Representative Circle: All members vote for a representative who then obtains sole control over internal decisions
  • Pure Circle: All members have an equal weight of votes for all internal decisions
  • Virtual Circle: No actions or data generated — purely tracks membership. The most basic virtual circle is the “network member” circle which includes all members connected to the same network.

Spheres — Advanced Group Models

Section titled “Spheres — Advanced Group Models”

While circles can describe simple group structures, they are not enough for complex organisations. Spheres are a superset of circles with more complex and customized internal structure and behaviors.

Aggregatable Property

Section titled “Aggregatable Property”

One of the unique features of spheres is their aggregatable property: a sphere can internally be made up of many sub-spheres or sub-circles that affect different parts of the inner structure.

Sub-groups essentially act as members for the purposes of filling special roles or handling procedures, but have their own internal behavior. This enables:

  • Hierarchical organization without centralized control
  • Different governance models at different scales within the same organization
  • Automatic restructuring when certain conditions are met

Customization

Section titled “Customization”

Depending on the application, different group models might make sense at different scales, so there might be automatic procedures that change the structure of a sphere once a certain condition is reached.

With the Governance Engine framework, spheres can implement arbitrarily complex governance structures through the combination of entities, objects, procedures, and connections.

Section titled “Related Concepts”