Our movements often have powerful ethics, critique and support, but lack coordination. Meanwhile, elite power already operates at industrial scale: through platforms, logistics, finance, bureaucracy, media, data and state capacity. For collective power to become a real counterpower, we need to move beyond good intentions towards self-organisation at scale.

This workshop asks: how can groups think, decide, allocate work, coordinate resources and act together at scale without creating bosses, bureaucracies or technocracies?

We will explore this by treating the workshop itself as a temporary self-organising system. A physical operational board will track the work of the session: facilitation, synthesis, documentation, critique, timekeeping, task allocation and final outputs. Participants can add, take, split or challenge tasks as the session unfolds.

The first part focuses on thinking together: how groups generate ideas, define values and decide what to focus on. The second part turns to doing together: who does what, what people can refuse refusal look like, and how to deal with free-riding, dropped commitments, invisible labour and overload.

Along the way, we will briefly draw on Project Cybersyn, the Chilean experiment in cybernetic economic coordination, and Divlab, the fictional labour-allocation system in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Both offer powerful dreams of large-scale coordination and warnings about control, coercion and technocratic capture.

Using various experiments, including social protocols and digital tools, we will build a shared map of the field: what already exists, what it is good for, where it fails, what dangers it carries, and what still needs to be invented.

Participants should leave with the sense that radically better self-organisation is possible, underexplored and politically urgent.