How it works

Missionism is a better way to organize work. The people building an organization progressively own it, help steer it, and stay aligned around a shared mission.

Missionism Protocol v0.1 · Draft · September 2026 · source: spec/canonical.json

The model

MISSION
What are we trying to accomplish?

VALUE
What actually advances the mission?

CONTRIBUTION
Who created that value?

OWNERSHIP
How should enduring value be distributed?

GOVERNANCE
Who gets to change the system?

FORK
What happens when we fundamentally disagree?

Asking these questions is part of how Missionism organizations work. Exact formulas for measuring value, issuing ownership, or representing missions in a federation are mostly open or proposed.

Canonical

A Missionism organization must publicly state a measurable mission; revenue or market capitalization alone is not a sufficient mission.

Canonical

People who create enduring value must have a viable path to meaningful ownership of that value.

Missions can contain missions

Canonical

Missions may contain child missions and participate in parent missions.

Canonical

A child mission may retain autonomy while contributing to a parent mission.

Each node can have a mission, value equation, contributors, ownership, governance, child missions, a parent mission, and a fork path.

MISSIONISM
    │
    ├── Healthcare
    │      │
    │      ├── Benchmark
    │      ├── Hospice Access
    │      └── Nursing Education
    │
    ├── Education
    │
    └── Climate

A worked example

The numbers below are illustrative. They explain the idea. They are not a required ownership formula.

Five people start a company.

Year 0

Alice               40%
Ben                 30%
Cara                20%
Pool                10%

Five years later, 30 additional people have created substantial enduring value.

Year 5

Alice               18%
Ben                 11%
Cara                8%
Later contributors  53%
Unallocated         10%

Nobody had their shares taken away.

New ownership was issued as new enduring value was created.

That company joins a larger mission

Canonical

A child mission may retain autonomy while contributing to a parent mission.

It retains autonomy over:

product
hiring
internal allocation

It participates upstream in:

shared standards
research
infrastructure
federation governance

Federation representationProposed

Different missions need representation without allowing giant missions to control everything, or tiny missions to have disproportionate control.

CONTRIBUTOR REPRESENTATION
Power based on contribution / ownership / value created

+

MISSION REPRESENTATION
Recognized missions receive independent representation

↓

Certain major decisions require agreement from both

This bicameral sketch is a proposed direction for experimentation—not a canonical requirement. The detailed mechanism remains open.

Proposal: docs/proposals/bicameral-representation.md · Open questions