Soft Infrastructures Diagram Explained
Strange Field Sociocratic Soft Infrastructures
Where we have landed so far
What is this?
This diagram is a map of how Strange Field organises itself, and why that organisation matters.
It represents something we have been building and refining since we first committed to sociocracy as our governance model: a structure in which decisions are distributed, power is shared, and circles of responsibility connect rather than dominate. This is not a management chart. It is closer to an ecology: a picture of how the different parts of Strange Field relate to one another, overlap, and move together.
We call this our Sociocratic Soft Infrastructures diagram. The phrase matters. "Soft infrastructures" are the social, relational, and organisational systems that allow culture to grow: shared knowledge, mutual accountability, distributed governance, collective learning. Unlike a building or a piece of equipment, soft infrastructure is the condition of trust, care, and shared purpose that makes everything else possible, particularly in under-resourced contexts where those conditions have historically been denied.
This diagram is our attempt to make those conditions visible, legible, and something we can continue to build on together.
Reading the diagram
The diagram is organised as a series of nested and overlapping circles. This is intentional: in sociocracy, circles are semi-autonomous domains of responsibility, each with its own aims, decision-making authority, and accountability, and each connected to the others through shared members and shared purpose.
The outermost ring, Sociocratic Soft Infrastructures, names the whole. Everything inside is part of the same project: building the conditions for a different kind of cultural organisation.
The General circle sits within that outer ring and holds the whole organisation together. It is where our Trustees sit, not above the other circles, but connected to them. The General circle concerns itself with organisational health, legal accountability, and the conditions that allow everything else to function.
The Operations layer is where the diagram's logic becomes most legible, and where the most important conceptual move is made.
Operations is not, in this model, a supporting function. It is not the administrative backstage to a creative front-of-house. It is better understood as the code of the organisation: the underlying logic, protocols, and shared agreements that make everything else run. Just as software code isn't separate from what an application does (it is what the application does), Operations here is the expressive and generative layer of how Strange Field functions as an organisation.
This means that the work of writing SOPs, managing communications systems, building shared calendars, maintaining data hygiene, and designing how information flows across circles is not administrative overhead. It is the practice of organisational design. It is how values become procedures, and procedures become culture. The decisions embedded in how we log an event, how we manage a fundraising deadline, how we store and share documents: these are not neutral technical choices. They encode what we think matters, what we trust people to hold, and what we require to be accountable.
Operations spans across the whole diagram for this reason: every other circle depends on the operational layer being well-designed and actively maintained. GOVERN needs functioning financial systems. RECLAIM needs reliable communications infrastructure. LEARN needs data practices that capture what matters. The Operations circle is the architecture that allows all of this to work without requiring a central command to hold it together.
Within and across the Operations layer, five domain circles sit alongside two cross-cutting functions, each with its own aims and responsibilities, all held within the same underlying organisational logic:
GOVERN holds the circles responsible for strategic and institutional stability: Strategy & Finance, and Governance & HR. These are not top-down functions; they are distributed responsibilities carried by people who hold particular domains of expertise and accountability within the circle structure.
RECLAIM is the circle through which Strange Field pursues its mission of community ownership of cultural infrastructure. It contains the work around French Street and The Pipe Factory, two sites where we are actively working toward community-owned, democratically governed cultural spaces. A Programmes circle sits within RECLAIM, connecting the spaces to the wider programme.
PROGRAMME sits at the heart of the diagram, at the centre where circles overlap. This is not accidental. The Community Team and Programme Team are connective tissue: the people and functions that hold relationships across the whole organisation, ensuring that work doesn't fragment into silos.
LEARN holds Strange Field's archival and educational work: the archive strand, Strange Exchange, and the pedagogical programmes that make up our radical education infrastructure. It connects directly to Programme.
MAKE holds the creative production programmes: the work of making art, collaborative projects, and interdisciplinary experimentation. It also connects to Programme, and like LEARN, it reflects a domain with its own distinct aims and ways of working.
Spanning across the diagram, crossing circles rather than sitting neatly within one, are Fundraising and Evaluation. These are drawn as overlapping, bridge-like shapes because they are genuinely cross-cutting: they belong to the whole organisation and must stay in relationship with every circle.
Why it's organised this way
The structure refuses hierarchy without refusing accountability.
Each circle has its own domain, the area it has authority over and responsibility for, but no single circle stands above the others. The Community Team sits at the centre of the diagram because relationships and programme delivery are genuinely central to everything we do. The Trustees and governance functions are present, but they are connected rather than commanding.
Consent guides decision-making across the structure. Where conventional organisations often concentrate power in an executive or board, we distribute it: each circle makes decisions within its own domain, and larger organisational decisions require the genuine consent of those they affect.
This is a deliberate reconfiguration of power. We believe the structures we inherit shape the possibilities of what we can create together. A hierarchical organisation tends to reproduce hierarchy: in who gets heard, who holds authority, whose knowledge counts. Sociocracy is our attempt to build something that works differently from the inside out.
Where we are
This diagram represents where we have landed so far, not a finished model, but a live and evolving one.
We have established the core circle structure and named the domains. We are actively developing the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that give each circle clarity about how it functions, how decisions are made, and how it connects to others. Fundraising has its own SOP. The LEARN circle has developed a Community Voice Framework. The programme circles are building their own documentation.
We are also, in parallel, developing an evaluation framework with tialt that is built around our values: relational, accessible, non-extractive, and designed to give us ways of understanding our own impact that don't require us to distort our practice to fit a conventional reporting mould.
The diagram is therefore both a map of what exists and a commitment to what we are still building.
Why this matters
PHF's investment in Strange Field as a site of radical governance is funding exactly what this diagram represents: the slow, serious work of building organisational infrastructure that embodies the values it claims.
Most cultural organisations inherit their governance from charity law, company law, and the expectations of funders: structures designed for a different purpose, adapted awkwardly. We are trying to design our structure from first principles, starting with questions about power, accountability, and what it means to make decisions collectively in a creative organisation rooted in community.
This is not straightforward. It is iterative, sometimes uncertain, and requires a kind of organisational patience that is hard to maintain under the pressures of project delivery and funding cycles. The PHF relationship gives us the space to keep testing.
The diagram is evidence of that work in progress. It is something we can point to and say: this is what we have been thinking about, this is how far we have come, and this is the direction we are going.