**Artifact** from Bead: F5b21ea4 · [canonical source](https://redfish.acequia.io/guerin/.agents/f5b21ea4-2b73-4c8b-96f0-892f63ad86cf/2026-06-04/artifacts/intermediation-and-selective-power.md) · session 2026-06-04 · discussion: Talk: F5b21ea4
## A working thinking document on the proposal's hardest design question **Bead:** `f5b21ea4-2b73-4c8b-96f0-892f63ad86cf` · **Date:** 2026-06-04 **Status:** Working draft. Prompted by Stephen's critique that the current Call to Action at [acequia.org/groundworks/](https://acequia.org/groundworks/) is too soft — it gestures at communities governing "the allocation and flow of resources" but never names *selective power* and never grapples with the structural fact that resources are currently *intercepted* by intermediaries on the way to communities. This document maps the diagnosis and the design-option space. It does not pick a single intervention — Stephen has flagged genuine uncertainty about which way to go, and that uncertainty is itself a finding. > **2026-06-04 redirect.** The crypto-flavored language in Options C, D, and F below (zero-knowledge proofs, multi-party computation, decentralized identifiers) is *retired* per Stephen's direction. The replacement framing is the *intelligence substrate* developed in the companion document [intelligence-blindness-and-the-digital-acequia.md](intelligence-blindness-and-the-digital-acequia.md). The operational claim shifts from "communities prove eligibility privately" (privacy-protocol framing) to "communities see what's actually happening on the ground and govern accordingly" (information-substrate framing). The intermediation-and-selective-power problem and its design options remain valid; the cryptographic vocabulary used to describe parts of the implementation does not. Read this document as the funding-and-selective-power half of the argument; read the intelligence-blindness document as the information-and-substrate half. **Companions:** [intelligence-blindness-and-the-digital-acequia.md](intelligence-blindness-and-the-digital-acequia.md), [user-stories-call-to-action.md](user-stories-call-to-action.md), [ostrom-principles-corporate-vs-acequia.md](ostrom-principles-corporate-vs-acequia.md).
## The diagnosis Resources for community well-being in New Mexico arrive from three main sources: 1. **State and federal tax revenue** — general fund allocations and program-specific appropriations (Medicaid, SNAP, education aid, housing vouchers, etc.). 2. **New Mexico oil-and-gas royalties from state public lands** — the Land Grant Permanent Fund, the State Investment Council distributions, the Severance Tax Permanent Fund. These are *common-pool resources* in the literal sense — extracted from state lands that belong to the public, theoretically held in trust for the people of New Mexico. 3. **Philanthropic donations** — in-state foundations (Con Alma, McCune, Daniels, Santa Fe Community Foundation), national foundations operating in NM, donor-advised funds, individual giving. In the current structure, none of these resources flow directly to the communities or households that need them. They are intercepted by *intermediaries* — primarily nonprofit corporations, supplemented by state agencies and quasi-public bodies. The intermediaries: - **Add their own eligibility criteria** (whom they will serve) - **Impose their own program designs** (what they will fund) - **Take their own overhead** (typically 15–30% of resources for administration, fundraising, and organizational infrastructure) - **Negotiate their own priorities with funders**, often misaligned with what the communities they nominally serve would themselves prioritize - **Hold gatekeeper power over participation** — communities and households must navigate the intermediaries' intake systems, eligibility rubrics, and program rules to access the underlying resources **The structural observation:** communities have *no selective power* over which intermediaries handle their resources. A neighborhood doesn't choose which nonprofit serves it; it gets whichever nonprofit happens to have grant funding for that domain in that geography. A household doesn't pick its housing-assistance organization the way it picks its grocery store. The "customer relationship" runs from the funder to the nonprofit, not from the community to the nonprofit. Communities are *downstream of a market they did not participate in*. This is what Stephen means by *interception*. It is a sharper diagnosis than the published proposal's "fragmentation" framing. Fragmentation says: *the institutions don't talk to each other well enough.* Interception says: *the institutions are positioned between the resources and the communities, and they keep some of the resource and shape what's left.* Fragmentation suggests "coordinate the institutions better." Interception suggests "give the communities the power to choose, or bypass, the institutions."
## What the current Call to Action does and does not do The revised CTA reads: *"We must establish local systems of shared stewardship where communities themselves govern the allocation and flow of resources, ensuring civic support meets community needs without institutional gatekeeping."* **What it does:** asserts that communities should govern the allocation and flow. Disclaims institutional gatekeeping. **What it does not do:** - It does not name *who currently holds the allocation power* and from whom it would be taken. - It does not articulate that "allocation and flow" is meaningfully different from "selection of suppliers." A community can have advisory input on a nonprofit's spending without having selective power over the nonprofit's existence in the community. - It does not say what *minimal* role corporate or governmental actors should retain. "Without institutional gatekeeping" is a negation, not a design. - It does not name the source of resources (taxes, state-land royalties, philanthropy) and therefore does not implicate the specific channels — public procurement, foundation grantmaking, state agency contracts — that would have to change. The current CTA is what a board can accept without changing anything operational. The CTA Stephen is reaching for would change operational structure.
## What "selective power" actually means Selective power, as Stephen frames it, is the power held by a buyer in a market: *if you don't serve me well, I will go to your competitor*. It is the discipline that competition imposes on a supplier without requiring the buyer to manage or own the supplier. Selective power assumes there are alternatives, that switching is feasible, and that the buyer's choice carries consequence for the supplier. In the current social-sector structure, **the community is not the buyer** — the funder is. The community is the *consumer*, but consumers without selective power are not customers; they are recipients. They cannot reward responsive service or punish unresponsive service. They cannot fire the nonprofit. The shift the radical reading of the proposal asks for: **the community becomes the buyer**. Resources flow to the community (at whatever scale — neighborhood, town, county acequia). The community decides which nonprofits, agencies, or other suppliers get to serve it, and on what terms. The nonprofit shifts from "contractor of the funder" to "supplier of the community." Accountability flows down the same channel as money flows down: from the source through the community to the chosen supplier. This inverts the existing market. It does not eliminate nonprofits or government agencies — but it changes their relationship to communities from *gatekeeper* to *vendor*.
## The design-option space Stephen explicitly flagged that he is *not certain* of the design intervention. Several candidates are worth weighing. They span a range of radicalism, speed, legal lift, and reversibility. ### Option A — Direct allocation (full demand-side flip) Public and philanthropic resources route directly to legally recognized local acequias at the appropriate scale. The acequias pool funds and allocate among chosen suppliers; existing nonprofits compete for contracts with the acequia. - **Pros.** Maximum selective power. Clean structural inversion. Resources match accountability. - **Cons.** Requires legal infrastructure analogous to NM state recognition of water acequias as political subdivisions — a multi-year legislative and constitutional effort. Sudden disempowerment of existing nonprofits is politically explosive. Some scale economies are lost. - **Time horizon.** 5–15 years for full implementation. ### Option B — Per-acequia block grants (partial demand-side flip) A portion of public and philanthropic resources (say 20–50%) routes through local acequias as flexible block grants. The remainder continues through existing nonprofit and agency channels. - **Pros.** Builds selective power incrementally without dismantling existing infrastructure overnight. Reversible if it doesn't work. Creates demonstration sites. - **Cons.** Two parallel systems are complex to maintain. The "70%-still-the-old-way" can swallow the "30%-new-way" through inertia. - **Time horizon.** 2–5 years for first cohort of demonstration acequias. ### Option C — Procurement-style supplier selection Local acequias issue requests-for-proposal to nonprofits for specific services they want delivered (mental-health crisis response, food distribution, elder transportation). Existing nonprofits compete on responsiveness, alignment, price. The acequia rates suppliers; ratings shape future selection. - **Pros.** Uses market discipline within the commons frame. Nonprofits compete on quality. Transparent accountability for both buyer and seller. - **Cons.** Acequias need procurement capacity (RFP writing, contract negotiation, vendor management) they don't currently have. Favors established nonprofits with bigger proposal teams. Introduces bureaucratic overhead at the acequia level. - **Time horizon.** Workable within 1–3 years if the procurement training and templates are seeded. ### Option D — Participatory budgeting at the acequia scale Each acequia sets its own budget priorities via parciante vote at the annual saca. Funders agree to fund according to the community-set priorities rather than their own pre-set program structures. - **Pros.** Procedural legitimacy. Well-tested model (Brazilian cities since the 1990s, Vallejo CA, NYC Council districts, dozens of cities globally). Doesn't require new legal entities. - **Cons.** The heavy lift is at the *funder* end, not the acequia end. Foundations and state agencies must agree to follow community priorities — historically they have resisted. Communities still don't get selective power over suppliers, only over priorities. - **Time horizon.** Depends entirely on funder buy-in; could be implemented quickly with willing funders, never with unwilling ones. ### Option E — Cooperative-supplier model Existing nonprofits restructure as member cooperatives owned (in part or in whole) by the local acequias they serve. Selective power is held through equity and governance rights within the supplier organization itself. - **Pros.** Aligns supplier governance with consumer governance. Durable, deeply structural. Cooperatives are a well-understood legal form with decades of precedent. - **Cons.** Requires fundamental legal restructuring of existing nonprofits — board composition changes, articles of incorporation amendments, possibly tax-status revisions. Many nonprofits' existing boards (composed of donors and corporate executives) will resist. Long timeline. - **Time horizon.** 10–20 years for substantial portion of NM nonprofit sector. ### Option F — Acequia-as-fiscal-agent (transitional / minimal-legal-lift) Acequias hold the funds (received as block grants or fiscal sponsorships). Nonprofits provide services on contract to the acequia. The acequia is the "1099 issuer," controls payment milestones, holds the final say on continuation. - **Pros.** Lightest legal lift. Uses existing contracting and fiscal-sponsorship mechanisms. Doesn't require new state recognition. - **Cons.** Doesn't necessarily change the dependency dynamic. If the acequia lacks capacity, it becomes another intermediary — just one with different branding. The radical claim is only as real as the acequia's actual selective power. - **Time horizon.** Pilots feasible within 6–18 months. ### Option G — Hybrid: minimal intermediation, scale-matched Distinguish what genuinely needs scale-of-aggregation (statewide emergency response, regulated medical care, hospital networks, regional infrastructure) from what doesn't (mutual aid, food sovereignty, hyperlocal care coordination, neighborhood emergency response). Retain minimal intermediation for the first; full local selective power for the second. - **Pros.** Pragmatic. Recognizes that *some* scale-of-service genuinely benefits from aggregation. Doesn't try to undo what works. Lets the proposal name what minimal intermediation looks like rather than dodge the question. - **Cons.** Risk of definitional creep: once a service is recognized as "needs intermediation," that intermediation tends to expand. Requires ongoing public deliberation about where the line is. - **Time horizon.** Variable by domain; some pieces could move fast.
## A note on combinations These options are not mutually exclusive. A plausible strategy combines several: - **Short-term (years 1–3):** Option F (acequia-as-fiscal-agent, low legal lift) at demonstration sites + Option D (participatory budgeting) with willing funders + Option C (procurement-style supplier selection) for specific service domains where acequias can quickly build procurement capacity. - **Medium-term (years 3–10):** Option B (per-acequia block grants, gradually rising portion) + Option E (cooperative restructuring of willing nonprofits) + ongoing Option G (deliberation about which services genuinely need intermediation). - **Long-term (years 10+):** Option A (direct allocation with full political-subdivision status for social-sector acequias). The combinations matter because the radical end-state (Option A) is not reachable without the demonstration cases that build capacity, trust, and political constituency.
## What "minimal" corporate/government oversight could actually mean Stephen's framing is that corporate (for-profit and nonprofit) and governmental actors should have **minimal**, not zero, governance and oversight. Mapping minimal in concrete terms: - **Government's minimal role:** legal recognition of acequias (Principle 7); honest accounting of common-pool resources from taxes and state-land royalties; baseline regulatory floors that protect against actual abuse (fraud, discrimination, public safety); inter-acequia dispute resolution at scales acequias cannot handle. - **Nonprofit corporations' minimal role:** specialized service provision as suppliers chosen by acequias; aggregation of capacity across acequias where genuinely useful (specialized clinical care, large-scale logistics); knowledge transfer and training; advocacy on behalf of acequias' shared concerns to higher-level political actors. - **Philanthropic funders' minimal role:** unrestricted block-grant funding to acequias; capacity-building support during transition; honest accounting of how their own priorities differ from acequia priorities and willingness to subordinate. What is **not** minimal — what these actors currently do but should stop doing — is *gatekeeping access to resources that originate outside the actor itself*. A nonprofit that adds eligibility criteria to a public benefit it administers is intercepting. A foundation that requires program designs to match its theory-of-change is intercepting. A state agency that conditions resources on conformity to its rubrics is intercepting. Minimal means *do your distinctive work and let the resources pass through; do not gate them*.
## Two candidate Calls to Action for Stephen's reaction The current published CTA does not name selective power, does not name interception, does not name the resource sources. Two candidate replacements that do: ### Cautious-radical (names the diagnosis; gestures at the inversion) > We must build a New Mexico where the resources of community well-being — public tax revenue, royalties from our shared lands, and philanthropic gifts — flow first to the local acequias that know what their communities actually need, and where the nonprofits and agencies that serve those communities do so by the acequias' invitation rather than the funders' assignment. ### Fully radical (names the inversion as such) > We must build a New Mexico where local communities hold both the resources and the selective power: choosing which nonprofits, agencies, and other suppliers serve them — and on what terms — rather than receiving whichever services the state or the foundations assigned to them. The role of corporate and governmental actors becomes minimal and chosen, not maximal and imposed. Both name the resource sources, name the inversion, and shift the corporate/governmental role to minimal. The first reads more like a continuation of the proposal's existing rhetorical register. The second reads as an explicit break from it. Either is structurally stronger than the published CTA.
## What this would require of the rest of the proposal If Stephen chooses to integrate any of this into the published document, several other sections would need work: - **§The diagnosis** needs to add the interception framing alongside (or instead of) the fragmentation framing. The fragmentation diagnosis is still true but it is the milder reading; the interception diagnosis is the structural one. - **§The intervention** needs to name selective power as the key shift. Currently it leans on commons-style arrangements and shared stewardship but stops short of saying communities choose their suppliers. - **§A proposed strategy focus for Groundworks** needs to articulate Groundworks' role under the new framing — which is significant. *If communities choose their suppliers, what is the role of the meta-nonprofit?* Probably: building acequia capacity, holding the federation registry, brokering peer learning across acequias, advocating to funders for the rules that make demand-side allocation possible. Not gatekeeping. - **§Working companions** (the section we just added) should add a link to this document so readers can see the design-space exploration.
## Risks Stephen should weigh 1. **The nonprofits currently on the Groundworks board may feel threatened.** The document currently positions Groundworks as the meta-nonprofit that helps *other* nonprofits succeed. This revised framing asks those other nonprofits to accept demotion from "primary actor" to "chosen supplier." Some will hear that as existential. The diplomatic management of this is non-trivial; the proposal may need to make explicit that this is not anti-nonprofit but pro-community-power, and that strong nonprofits with genuine value to communities will thrive in the new system. 2. **Selective power requires capacity that doesn't exist yet.** Communities don't currently have RFP-writing, contract-negotiating, financial-stewardship, vendor-management capacity. Building that capacity is part of the strategy or the strategy fails. The proposal cannot just declare selective power; it must include a capacity-building plan. 3. **Speed matters in both directions.** Move too fast: existing services get disrupted during transition, communities lose access. Move too slow: the radical claim is hollow and the proposal collapses into reform-as-usual. 4. **The legal-political infrastructure is multi-year work.** Particularly the Land Grant Permanent Fund distribution rules and the recognition of social-sector acequias as political subdivisions. This is real legislative work, not a programmatic adjustment. 5. **Philanthropic funders may resist.** Many foundations exist precisely to provide intermediation. They will not voluntarily route their funds through acequias if doing so eliminates their distinctive role. Some will; many won't. The strategy needs to be honest about which funders are early-adopter-likely and which will need to be moved through political pressure or peer-effect over years. 6. **The proposal's intellectual claim — that acequia governance is a generalizable pattern — has not actually been proven at the scale this strategy requires.** Water acequias work at the scale of a few hundred families and a single ditch. Social-sector acequias would need to scale across far more diverse domains and larger populations. The CAS framing from the Gemini chat is intellectually supportive but the empirical demonstration is still missing.
## Where my own uncertainty lands I think Options B + C + F in combination, on a 2–5 year horizon, are the cleanest first move — building demonstration sites and capacity while leaving Options A and E as the long-horizon legal-structural work. The fully-radical CTA above is closer to what I think the proposal *means* than the cautious-radical CTA is. But the strongest move is probably to **name the diagnosis in the document body** (interception, not just fragmentation), **sharpen the CTA to name selective power**, and **acknowledge the design-intervention uncertainty as honestly as we are doing here** rather than pretending to have picked one. The board can react to a clear diagnosis and a sharp question. The board cannot react to a strategic vision that has its hardest question hidden.
## Process notes - This document does not have notes-for-board-review because it is not for board reading in its current form. It is staging material for Stephen's design work. The diagnosis and the option space might inform a future proposal revision, but the candor here ("which nonprofits should accept demotion," "the empirical demonstration is still missing") is not yet board-ready. - If Stephen chooses to incorporate any of this into [acequia.org/groundworks/](https://acequia.org/groundworks/), it would likely live in a new §The deeper diagnosis or §The structural shift section between §The intervention and §A proposed strategy focus. The CTA would be replaced. A new short subsection on Groundworks' revised role would follow. - This document is itself an experiment in how thinking-in-public can happen inside a bead artifact — the "where my own uncertainty lands" section names the agent's view honestly so Stephen can engage with it rather than work around a falsely confident recommendation.