As you know, we regularly review and update S3 to integrate learning from real-life applications in organizations around the world. Our last big update to the Practical Guide was in December 2019, followed by another release in April/ May 2020. You can always find the latest changes listed in the Changelog.
Here are the most important changes you need to know about:
Sociocracy 3.0 is a Social Technology
In our ongoing endeavor to describe what S3 is, we first called it a framework, which some people mistakenly understood to mean “method”, so we started referring to S3 as a practical guide instead, to emphasize it’s flexible and open nature. But S3 also facilitates a gradual change toward an agile and sociocratic mindset in groups of people who intentionally apply S3 patterns and principles to their collaboration. We believe that the term Social Technology more accurately describes S3.
From the Glossary:
Social technology is any process, technique, method, skill, or any other approach that people can use to influence social systems — organizations, societies, communities etc — to support achieving shared objectives and guide meaningful interaction and exchange.
Two “new” concepts, and two “new” patterns
Objections and agreements have always been core concepts of S3, but until recently you’d find objection and agreement were actually described as patterns in S3. We’ve finally untangled that mess by adding a description of these two important concepts to the introduction instead. What remains of the pattern descriptions has now been revised and renamed appropriately:
New style for the illustrations
Thanks to Bernhard’s efforts, we now have an improved set of illustrations throughout the guide. Besides a more pleasant color-scheme, this is the first step towards being able to translate the illustrations into other languages using Crowdin (the crowdsourced translation platform we use for translating the guide).
New Community Translations
The S3 Practical Guide is now available in various formats in German, French, Dutch and Hebrew. The French version includes the most recent updates.
The S3 Learning Posters have been translated to German, Flanders (BE), Dutch (NL), Spanish and Russian! At the bottom of each page, you will find the CC Licence which includes the date when that particular poster was last updated. The German and Russian posters are the most up-to-date.
Please be mindful as you are using these translated materials, that some of them haven’t been updated recently and it’s likely that some of the content has changed. You can always reference the English materials for the most up-to-date version.
If you have a good understanding of S3 and would enjoy contributing toward making S3 resources available in your language, please check out the S3 Translation Project to learn more.