HYPHA
A modular governance model built around a simple product primitive: a space with its own agreements, members, resources, and decision process.
If hierarchy is reduced, its coordination functions still have to live somewhere.
Hypha was exploring collective ownership and more distributed ways of organizing. The challenge was not simply to remove hierarchy. It was to make the work hierarchy had been carrying — membership, authority, decisions, resources, boundaries, accountability — explicit enough to distribute.
Without that structure, local autonomy quickly became ambiguity: people could participate, but it was harder to know who belonged, who could decide, what a group could commit, and how one team related to the wider organization.
Governance was fragmented
Membership, decisions, roles, agreements, and treasury could evolve in separate places.
Autonomy needed boundaries
A team can only govern locally when its authority and relationship to the wider system are legible.
Teams kept reinventing the same mechanics
Every new group needed a way to handle entry, decisions, resources, and exit.
The model emerged through workshops with the people who had to use it.
I worked with key stakeholders to surface how the organization actually operated, where governance became difficult, and what had to become explicit in the product. The workshops moved from lived situations and tensions toward shared primitives and flows.
From organizational language to product structure
The work connected questions about membership, agreements, authority, decisions, resources, and nested teams. Instead of solving each one as a separate feature, we looked for a common grammar that could hold them together.
What is a group?
What gives it a boundary, purpose, membership, and authority?
How does someone participate?
What changes when they enter, take responsibility, or leave?
How does a decision become real?
Who can propose, decide, commit resources, and carry the result?
How do groups compose?
How can a local team remain autonomous without becoming disconnected from the larger system?
A space became the repeatable governance cell.
The key move was to model governance as a bounded context rather than one organization-wide layer. Each space could carry the minimum structure required to govern locally.
Agreements
Purpose, rules, commitments, boundaries, and the conditions of participation.
Members
Who belongs, what roles they hold, and what rights and responsibilities come with membership.
Treasury
The resources the space can steward and the authority required to move them.
SPACE
A bounded governance context with its own agreements, membership, resources, and decision process. A space can also contain other spaces.
Repeat the grammar, not the rules.
A project, team, working group, or whole organization can use the same basic structure without sharing the same local agreements. This lets the system remain understandable while preserving local autonomy.
members
treasury
decisions
Local autonomy
Each space can act inside an explicit domain rather than routing every decision upward.
Shared grammar
Different groups can govern differently while the product remains recognizable.
Composability
Spaces can contain spaces, so local contexts can compose into a larger system.
A governance space needs a designed way to enter, decide, and exit.
Membership is not a static record. It changes rights, responsibilities, permissions, and relationships. We modeled participation as a lifecycle.
Join with context
Make the boundary of the space explicit before membership begins.
Turn participation into authority
Make the path from issue to consequence visible.
Leave without ambiguity
Resolve commitments, access, and resources rather than simply deleting a user.
A decision is more than a vote.
The product needed to make the whole path visible: what triggered the decision, who had authority, how others participated, what changed, and where the result was recorded.
Signal
Proposal
Deliberation
Decision
Effect / record
The governance model became a set of product views.
The interface needed to let someone understand a space, see who could do what, make a decision, and connect resource movement to authority. These wireframes translate the system model into product structure.
Product Space
Agreements
Members
Treasury
Child spaces
Authority by role
Role map
Change client pricing policy
Decision
Participation
Effect
Resources & authority
Available
Authority
Spaces inside spaces
My work was the product and organizational system behind the interface.
Product + systems architecture
I worked across facilitation, product leadership, governance logic, and system design.
- Facilitated workshops with key stakeholders
- Synthesized organizational needs into product structure
- Modeled spaces, memberships, decision flows, and resource authority
- Connected governance principles to entities, states, and workflows
- Worked across product, engineering, community, and organizational constraints
Visual design was a separate contribution
The final visual interface was created by another designer. My work focused on the model, flows, product logic, and the system those interfaces had to express.
The wireframes on this page are a current reconstruction of that product logic for the case study.
Governance became easier to design once it became product architecture.
Autonomy needs explicit boundaries
Local decision-making works better when authority, resources, and responsibilities are visible.
Participation is a lifecycle
Entry, decision-making, and exit are connected states with rights, obligations, and consequences.
A shared grammar allows difference
Groups can govern differently without forcing the product to reinvent membership, resources, and decisions every time.