Harnessing self-management to tackle grand challenges: the points-based participation architecture of São Paulo’s housing movement

We propose that hierarchical organizations can engender and sustain the collaboration of large numbers of autonomous actors by establishing self-managed, mission-aligned collectives. Informing our claim are preliminary findings from an ongoing study of the housing movement in São Paulo, Brazil. Unexpectedly, we find that hierarchical Social Movement Organizations (SMOs) have, for more than three decades, incentivized broad-based voluntary engagement in protest actions aimed at formulating new housing policy by educating and encouraging low-income families to join collectives tasked with developing and self-managing new housing projects. We trace the sustainability of this participation architecture to an SMO-designed, points-based system, which functions as an integrating mechanism affording: (1) goal alignment between large numbers of autonomous actors and the leadership of a hierarchical organization; (2) voluntary engagement by autonomous actors in activities that simultaneously address local and higher order goals; (3) role and task allocation without legal control or close oversight; and (4) retention within the participation architecture by equipping autonomous actors with structure and measurable progress towards local goals and fairly distributing benefits of collective work. We discuss implications to our understanding of how to achieve concerted action at scale towards a grand challenge.