**Artifact** from Bead: F5b21ea4 · [canonical source](https://redfish.acequia.io/guerin/.agents/f5b21ea4-2b73-4c8b-96f0-892f63ad86cf/2026-06-04/artifacts/user-stories-call-to-action.md) · session 2026-06-04 · discussion: Talk: F5b21ea4
**Bead:** `f5b21ea4-2b73-4c8b-96f0-892f63ad86cf` · **Date:** 2026-06-04 **Status:** Working draft for Stephen's review. Not yet integrated into [acequia.org/groundworks/](https://acequia.org/groundworks/). **Companion:** [ostrom-principles-corporate-vs-acequia.md](ostrom-principles-corporate-vs-acequia.md) — same argument organized around Ostrom's eight design principles rather than narrative domains. The two artifacts cross-reference each other.
## The revised call to action these five stories illustrate > *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.* (Working version, derived from Gemini Option 2 in [the 2026-06-04 sharing session](gemini-share-680dbb460d72.md). Final wording TBD; "shared stewardship" already appears elsewhere in the proposal so the vocabulary is consistent.) This shifts the proposal from *"communities **help shape** how support flows"* to *"communities themselves **govern** allocation and flow."* The five stories below show what that shift looks like in lived practice. Stories 1–3 illustrate the *digital tactics* enabled by the shift (food classification, emergency coordination, privacy-preserving eligibility). Story 4 illustrates the **intra-community social primitive** those tactics serve — the mayordomo pattern of agonistic, face-to-face dispute resolution that acequias have refined over four centuries. Story 5 illustrates the **inter-community federation layer** — how a local wellness acequia monitors and transacts with adjacent acequias and with Groundworks itself, without surrendering local autonomy. Together they answer: *what does the call to action mean on a Tuesday morning in Chimayó, in San Miguel County, in Española, in the Embudo Valley, and across the wellness networks Groundworks coordinates statewide?*
## Story 1 — Chimayó community food network **Cast.** Esperanza, who runs a community kitchen out of her parish hall. The cooks at Chimayó Elementary. Three nearby farms growing blue corn, chicos, and calabacitas. The state CYFD nutrition office. **Before (top-down, categorical).** The state-administered school nutrition program defines eligible foods by USDA categorical bucket. Blue corn doesn't have a SKU. Chicos aren't in the system. The cafeteria can't buy from Esperanza's farm partners because the categorical classification doesn't accommodate traditional Northern New Mexico staples; aggregated state procurement contracts route the dollars to a Sysco distributor in Albuquerque. The local farms grow food the local school is not allowed to serve to local kids. **After (community-governed flow).** The community adopts its own nutrition taxonomy — blue corn, chicos, posole, calabacitas — through a locally maintained food classification map. State funds for school nutrition continue to flow in, but allocation decisions sit with the community kitchen network and a parent-and-teacher quorum. A community-hosted ledger shows every dollar in and every dollar out; the state has a read-only view, not a categorical veto. The kids eat blue corn posole because the community decided blue corn posole counts. **What shifted.** Classification authority moved from a federal SKU system to a local taxonomy. Allocation power moved from a state procurement contract to a community quorum. The state's role shifted from gatekeeper to participant.
## Story 2 — Wildfire response in San Miguel County **Cast.** María, who coordinates her neighborhood's mutual-aid network after the 2022 Hermit's Peak fire. Elena, an elderly neighbor on a county road most evacuation maps don't know. The Las Vegas Fire Department. The state Emergency Operations Center in Santa Fe. **Before (top-down, aggregated).** When fire moves fast, the state EOC issues evacuation orders based on aggregated GIS layers from federal sources — layers that don't reflect which county roads are passable in May versus October, which households need a ride, or which acequias are running at capacity for water defense. State-coordinated mutual aid arrives eighteen hours after the order; meanwhile María has already driven three elderly neighbors to higher ground using her own pickup and her own knowledge of the back roads. **After (community-governed flow).** A community-hosted map — built by María's network using local annotations layered onto open imagery — shows real-time road conditions, the addresses of residents who have registered mobility needs, water-defense capacity at each acequia gate, and shelter offers from churches and schools. The state EOC has a read-only window into the community map. Local crews dispatch based on local knowledge in real time; the state coordinates inter-county logistics but doesn't bottleneck intra-community response. Elena gets picked up at hour one, not hour eighteen. **What shifted.** The "source of truth" moved from a remote federal data layer to a community-maintained map. Coordination moved from sequential top-down dispatch to peer-to-peer with state visibility. Local knowledge — what María knows about the back roads — became system intelligence rather than a workaround.
## Story 3 — Rental assistance in Española **Cast.** Carlos, a single father laid off in March when the call center closed. Manny, who administers a community rapid-response fund seeded by local foundations and a parish endowment. Carlos's landlord. The state Human Services Department. **Before (top-down, surveillance-shaped).** Carlos applies to three different agencies for rental assistance. Each one asks for bank statements, two years of tax returns, proof of every household member's identity, and a written explanation of why he is asking for help. Approval takes six to eight weeks. Funds flow from the state through a designated nonprofit to the landlord. Carlos's full financial history sits in three separate databases, and he is one of dozens whose stories are aggregated into a quarterly impact report. **After (community-governed flow, sousveillance).** Carlos applies to the local community fund Manny administers. The fund's eligibility criteria — defined by community members, not by state regulation — accept a short attestation that Carlos meets locally-defined hardship thresholds (recent layoff, dependents, no other liquid assets). Carlos's bank balance, tax returns, and dependents' names never leave his phone; he proves he qualifies without disclosing the underlying records. The fund disburses within seventy-two hours by quorum: Manny, two community stewards, and Carlos's parish lay leader all sign off. The fund's ledger is public — every disbursement, including Carlos's, is visible by amount and category; the individuals behind the disbursements are not. The institutional flow inverts: the state can see that the fund is operating soundly without seeing into anyone's life. **What shifted.** The data flow inverted from *"the individual exposes their life to institutions"* to *"the individual proves eligibility privately; the institutions' actions are public."* Decision authority moved from a remote bureaucracy to a local quorum. The fund is transparent; the individual is not. This is the operational meaning of sousveillance: watch the flows, not the people.
## Story 4 — An agonistic dispute resolved by a mayordomo in the Embudo Valley **Cast.** Sylvia, an elder and former parciante who now serves as mayordomo of a community rapid-response fund. The Vigil family, whose roof failed in a flash flood last weekend. The Embudo Valley Elders' Cooperative, whose only van — the lifeline for several housebound residents — broke down the same week. The state Human Services Department emergency-assistance panel in Albuquerque (the top-down alternative). **Before (top-down, adversarial-anonymous).** The Vigils file an emergency-housing application. The cooperative files an emergency-transportation application. The applications go to a state panel in Albuquerque that scores them against a fixed rubric: "severity of immediate harm," "household composition," "documented prior assistance." The two claims are processed as if they were unrelated; the rubric makes the applicants invisible to each other. The Vigils score higher (the rubric weights children's housing); the cooperative is denied with a form letter that explains nothing. One elderly resident misses three medical appointments. The cooperative's coordinator stops applying for state programs altogether. Nobody in either group ever knew there was a conflict. **After (agonistic, mayordomo-mediated).** Both claims reach Sylvia within the same week. She knows both groups personally — she danced at the Vigils' wedding; she has driven the cooperative's van herself when the regular driver was out sick. She convenes the next monthly fund gathering on three days' notice and both parties attend. The dispute is **named openly** in front of thirty community members. Nobody pretends the conflict isn't there. The Vigils describe what they need; the cooperative describes what it needs; both claims are accepted as legitimate. The room works the problem. The solution that emerges was on neither application form: the parish's spare van covers the cooperative's transportation for two weeks; the fund covers the Vigils' housing in full now; the van repair is funded in the next cycle from a community fundraiser the cooperative agrees to organize. The fund's ledger records the decision and the reasoning. Both parties leave with their claims acknowledged and their community standing intact. A month later, the cooperative's coordinator and the Vigil parents end up working the saca together. **What shifted.** The conflict became *visible* — addressed in the open, by people who knew both parties, in a room able to invent solutions that weren't on any form. The mayordomo did not *judge*; she *catalyzed*. The two parties remained legitimate adversaries within a shared community rather than anonymous competitors for a scarce institutional resource. This is what an **agonistic** governance method looks like in practice — conflict is engaged, not suppressed, and the institution that hosts the conflict (the fund, the community, the saca) is strengthened by the engagement rather than fractured by it. **Why this story matters to the proposal.** Stories 1–3 illustrate the *digital tactics* the strategy enables. Story 4 illustrates the **intra-community social primitive** those tactics serve. The mayordomo pattern — face-to-face, agonistic, in-the-open, catalyzed not adjudicated — is the governance method acequias have refined over four centuries. The digital tools (local-first GIS, community ledgers, privacy-preserving eligibility) are infrastructure for this pattern, not replacements for it. Strip the digital layer away and Story 4 still works. Strip the mayordomo pattern away and the digital layer becomes another centralized bureaucracy that happens to use cryptography.
## Story 5 — The Taos wellness acequia and its neighbors **Cast.** Diego, a former social worker now serving as mayordomo of the **Vigil Hill Wellness Network** — six small nonprofits in Taos County (a peer-support collective, a youth crisis line, a sober-living house, an elder check-in service, a domestic-violence safe-house, and a substance-recovery group) that organized themselves as a wellness acequia eighteen months ago. Beatriz, the parallel mayordomo of the **Río Gallinas Wellness Acequia** in San Miguel County. A state foundation preparing to release $400,000 for "rural mental-health outcomes." And Groundworks New Mexico, the meta-nonprofit. **Before (top-down, atomized).** The six Taos organizations each have their own funder relationships, intake forms, eligibility criteria, and case-tracking databases. A young person in treatment at the sober-living house starts over from scratch when they need peer-support services from the collective across town — same county, different intake. When the state-foundation grant opens, all twelve wellness-adjacent nonprofits in Northern New Mexico write competing applications; the foundation's rubric forces them to translate their work into a single standardized vocabulary; the rubric becomes the de facto definition of "what wellness work counts." When a participant moves from Taos to Las Vegas mid-treatment, they re-tell their story to a new intake worker and rejoin a new waiting list. Cross-statewide coordination happens through twice-yearly conferences where everyone reports out, nobody adjusts, and the funder underwrites the catering. **After (nested federation).** The Vigil Hill Wellness Network operates as a single wellness acequia: the six organizations keep their individual identities and operating autonomy but share a participant trust registry (locally hosted, mutually maintained), a common ledger of shared resources (motel-night vouchers, van capacity, counselor availability), and a monthly saca where Diego facilitates the network's collective decisions. The state-foundation grant is negotiated by **Groundworks** as a single umbrella commitment on behalf of the federated wellness acequias; the foundation gets aggregated outcomes and a transparent ledger without forcing the local acequias to standardize their internal methods. When the young person moves from Taos to Las Vegas, Diego and Beatriz exchange a peer trust transfer — mayordomo-to-mayordomo, not via a central database. The participant's credential carries forward; no story has to be retold; the receiving acequia confirms membership and continues care. **What shifted.** The locus of *standardization* moved from the funder to the local acequia, which can standardize internally if it chooses but is no longer forced to standardize *against* other acequias. The locus of *monitoring* moved from a state regulator to a peer network of mayordomos who watch each other's accountability without exposing participant data. The locus of *cross-group transaction* moved from anonymous grant competition to direct mayordomo-to-mayordomo peer transfer. And Groundworks' role clarified: it is **not** a state-level command over the local acequias; it is the **federation layer** — a registry, a trust broker, a saca convener at the statewide scale, a single voice that can negotiate with funders on behalf of many local acequias without dictating to any of them. **Why this story matters to the proposal.** Ostrom's eighth design principle is *nested enterprises*: for commons that are part of larger systems, governance activities are organized in multiple layers, each with its own autonomy and rules. This story is what nesting looks like in the social sector. The local wellness acequia (Vigil Hill) governs itself. The adjacent wellness acequia (Río Gallinas) governs itself. Groundworks coordinates between them and represents them to outside actors without governing them. That is also the literal acequia pattern at the watershed scale: individual ditches manage their own water, watershed commissions handle only what genuinely needs cross-ditch coordination, the state engineer adjudicates only when commissions can't resolve a conflict among themselves. Story 5 shows how the Groundworks proposal becomes recognizable at scale — not as a new bureaucracy, but as a new *layer* in a federation that lets local autonomy survive contact with statewide resources. It also gives the board a concrete answer to the question *"so what does Groundworks actually do, day to day, under this strategy?"* — it convenes the saca at the statewide scale, holds the federation registry, brokers peer trust transfers, and negotiates umbrella commitments with funders.
## Mapping the five stories to the tactical layers | Story | Tactic illustrated | Layer | |-------|-------------------|-------| | 1. Chimayó food network | Living classifications (bottom-up taxonomy); transparent community ledger of resource flows | Local data sovereignty + community ledger | | 2. San Miguel wildfire | Community-hosted GIS; peer-to-peer coordination with state visibility | Local-first GIS + sousveillance over surveillance | | 3. Española rental assistance | Local-quorum allocation; privacy-preserving eligibility; public ledger of flows, private individual data | Privacy-preserving collective action + community ledger | | 4. Embudo Valley dispute | Agonistic conflict named in the open; mayordomo as catalyst not judge; community-invented solutions | **Intra-community governance primitive** (the social pattern the digital layers serve) | | 5. Taos wellness federation | Nested governance with peer monitoring; mayordomo-to-mayordomo trust transfers; Groundworks as federation broker not allocator | **Inter-community federation layer** (Ostrom's nested-enterprises principle; how local autonomy survives at scale) | All five stories share the same posture: **the community is the source of truth and the locus of decision; outside actors — state, funder, meta-nonprofit — earn visibility and coordination authority by serving local autonomy, not by gating it.** That is the operational meaning of the revised call to action. Together, the five make a layered argument: - **Stories 1–3** show the digital tactics — the *infrastructure* the proposal enables. - **Story 4** shows the mayordomo pattern — the *intra-community governance method* that infrastructure serves. - **Story 5** shows the nested federation — *how local autonomy survives at scale* when state-level funders, peer acequias, and the meta-nonprofit (Groundworks) all need to interact. Strip any layer away and the proposal collapses into a recognizable failure mode. Digital-only becomes *"just another tech platform."* Governance-only without federation becomes *"a hundred siloed acequias with no way to learn from each other or transact across boundaries."* Federation-only without local governance becomes *"another centralized statewide command, just with a softer brand."* The five stories belong together precisely because they show the proposal is not a tech proposal, and not just a governance proposal, but a **federated governance proposal with a tech layer** — and they show what Groundworks' role becomes inside it: the federation layer that serves the local acequias rather than coordinating from above them.
## Notes for board review - These stories are illustrative composites, not case studies of specific named individuals. Before publishing, either replace with vetted real examples (Mora Land Grant, Embudo Valley, Las Vegas mutual-aid network, etc.) or flag clearly as scenarios. - Story 3 deliberately avoids medical records as the eligibility example, per the political-flashpoint risk noted in [critique-v2-revised.md](../notes/critique-v2-revised.md). Medical-data examples belong in the technical companion document, not the strategy doc. - Stories 1–3 are ~250 words each; Stories 4 and 5 run longer (~400 words each) because they carry the structural conceptual weight — intra-community governance (Story 4) and inter-community federation (Story 5) are the keystone arguments. They could be condensed to ~80-word inset boxes alongside the main proposal sections if the board wants narrative anchors without disrupting the main argument; or kept full-length as an appendix. - None of these stories uses the words *zero-knowledge proof*, *multi-signature*, *DID*, or *MPC*. The technical specifics are demonstrated through plain-language behaviors (the data never leaves his phone; the fund disburses by quorum; the ledger is public). The cryptographic terminology stays in the technical companion document. - Each story names a real Northern New Mexico place. If publishing, sanity-check with someone from that community first — especially Story 2 (Hermit's Peak survivors are still organizing; speaking on their behalf without consultation would land badly), and Story 4 (mayordomo is a living governance role in the Embudo Valley; using the term in a composite scenario carries weight and should be reviewed by an actual parciante or mayordomo from the area). - "Agonistic" in Story 4 is used in the Chantal Mouffe sense — productive conflict between legitimate adversaries within a shared institution, distinct from antagonistic conflict between enemies. The proposal may or may not want to invoke this term explicitly; the *behavior* is what matters and the term can stay implicit if the board would prefer. - Story 5 names "Ostrom's eighth design principle" (*nested enterprises*) explicitly. This is the principle most directly answering the question *"what is Groundworks' role under this strategy?"* and worth keeping the reference if the board responds well to academic anchoring. If not, the principle can stay implicit and the story can stand on its own narrative weight. - "Vigil Hill Wellness Network" and "Río Gallinas Wellness Acequia" in Story 5 are invented names. Before publishing, either generalize ("the Taos wellness network," "the Las Vegas wellness network") or co-design real names with actual nonprofits that might want to be the first federated wellness acequia. The story is more vivid with named networks but more responsible with generics on a first draft.