What We Learned Being Three: Notes on Shared Leadership at DemocráTICa

DemocráTICa is implemented by Wingu, Civic House, and Kubadili, with support from CIVICUS through the Digital Democracy Initiative. The program invites the Latin American ecosystem to stop working as isolated islands. These are some notes on what it took, behind the scenes, for three different organizations to make that proposal credibly. Written from the role of Scrum Master of the program.

When three leading organizations in the region — Wingu, Kubadili, and Civic House — decided to join forces to drive DemocráTICa forward, the starting point couldn't have been more fitting. Each brought an essential strategic "vertical": technology, communities, advocacy, and operations. We had specialized knowledge and a shared commitment to digital democracy in Latin America. But moving from design on paper to daily operational coexistence brought an inevitable challenge: how do you balance leaderships and make decisions without losing autonomy?

In the early months of the Consortium's operation, a familiar tension appeared. Someone asks for details: what state each activity is in, who's responsible for each deliverable, when each piece of data will arrive. And on the other side, that insistence reads as excessive control. As a lack of trust. As a way of working that isn't "ours."

That reading has an easy, available explanation: we are different organizational cultures. And it isn't false. DemocráTICa's design was deliberate on this point: each organization would contribute from its own expertise, and that complementarity was an asset, not an accident. But as a diagnosis of day-to-day friction, "we're different cultures" has a serious problem: nothing can be done with it. It leaves everyone in the right and no one with a possible action.

The reading that ended up being more useful was different. Excessive control is rarely a character trait. It's almost always what shows up when visibility is missing. When there's no place to see the whole picture, someone will try to reconstruct it by asking for the pieces one by one. It isn't distrust: it's a request for a overview that has nowhere to land.

That shift completely changes what happens next. If the problem is one of character, you have to ask someone to trust more. If the problem is a lack of infrastructure for these conversations, you have to build it.

Two levels and one close conversation

As the team grew, we organized responsibility into two levels. The Core Staff brought together, weekly, the leads of the mechanisms — Fund, Network, POLIS — and of the cross-cutting strategies: digital ecosystem, monitoring and evaluation, and learning and knowledge management. This was the space for strategic follow-up, synergy between mechanisms, and decisions that affected everyone. The Expanded Team included everyone involved in any part of the program, with monthly gatherings for connection and shared understanding.

A third level was added to these two — less visible, and perhaps the most decisive: one-on-one spaces between the Project Manager and each lead, to closely follow up on issues that required specific attention.

That third level wasn't in the original plan. At first I proposed group retrospectives, expecting them to function as the engine of continuous improvement. They lost momentum quickly. Not because the team resisted them, but because there was no need to build internal working agreements at that scale: each mechanism already had its own. Reflection and improvement ended up happening, with much greater density, in the one-on-ones and in the operational team spaces.

There was a lesson there that applies to any team: agility isn't about sustaining the ritual, it's about asking what need it was meant to cover and whether that need is still alive. When the answer is no, insisting on the ceremony is the opposite of being agile.

For those individual conversations to be fruitful — and not a private accumulation of complaints — we worked from Nonviolent Communication. Early on there were tensions between leaderships, and it was necessary to address them head-on: feedback conversations and agreement-building, where what mattered was making discomfort speakable before it hardened into a position.

Simplifying as a strategic decision

In the social sector, the urgency of the causes pushes you to want to take on everything. Every issue feels important, every opportunity feels urgent, and the result is an overload that reads as commitment but functions as paralysis.

A good part of the work consisted of building prioritization practices into the conversations themselves, drawing on a principle from the Agile Manifesto that's rarely cited: simplicity, understood as the art of maximizing the amount of work not done.

Being able to say "we're not doing this right now" or "this isn't a Core Staff decision" isn't giving something up. It's freeing up energy and attention for what we're actually sustaining.

The single-Post-it test

At one of the Expanded Team gatherings, we ran a simple exercise. On a line with three zones — individual, cooperation, collaboration — each person placed the milestones, tasks, and initiatives on their radar according to how they'd want to work on them. Individual: where one person has the experience and the autonomy to resolve something. Cooperation: where there's division of labor and efficiency through specialization. Collaboration: where synergy, co-creation, and constant interaction are needed to come up with ideas and make decisions.

Then we shared in small groups and in plenary, looking for spaces of joint work we hadn't yet identified.

The result was unexpected. We discussed a single Post-it.

A team that, in its retrospectives, had been naming silo work, unclear role scopes, and disconnection between mechanisms — when asked to decide what needed to be done together and what didn't — agreed on almost everything. There was no real difference of opinion. Everyone could see where convergence was needed.

What was missing was the place where that could happen. The silo wasn't ideological. It was structural. And unlike a difference of cultures, that can be built.

That distinction turned out to be the key to the balance: there's a need for order and a need for convergence, and they aren't the same thing. Confusing them explains a good part of the friction in consortiums. A mechanism asks for autonomy while also calling for more concentrated decision-making; both things are reasonable once you understand that the first is about execution, and the second about shared direction.

When you have to respond fast

The proof that something had settled into place wasn't an internal meeting. It was what happened when the context demanded a reaction.

The cancellation of RightsCon left the regional ecosystem without one of its most important gathering spaces, and with dozens of conversations, workshops, and presentations with nowhere to go. Within a few weeks we convened the Open Space for Digital Democracy: a horizontal, self-organized gathering with no set agenda, to hold what had been left stranded. Organizations from seven countries took part, across six simultaneous rooms, on topics ranging from the sustainability of initiatives to information integrity in electoral contexts.

From that came Weaving Digital Sovereignty, a two-part series to build a joint declaration on the conditions needed to sustain digital democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean, and a shared advocacy agenda toward multilateral organizations.

What made it possible was a small team where all three organizations were genuinely represented, each from its own strength: advocacy experience from Civic House; knowledge of the regional ecosystem and of virtual gathering tools from Wingu; process design and follow-up from Kubadili; and overall coordination holding it all together.

It wasn't one organization inviting the others. It was a single team with a single question: what alliances do we need to weave to have influence in the spaces where the region's digital future is being defined?

Ceasing to be islands, at both scales

DemocráTICa starts from an uncomfortable diagnosis of the ecosystem: there are initiatives with enormous technical potential working in isolation, duplicating learnings and competing for the same resources. A large part of the program exists to turn that occasional cooperation into sustained coordination.

The central lesson of these years is that this proposal can't be made from the outside. A program that asks the social sector to stop being an archipelago needs, first, not to be one itself. And for that, less epic is needed than people tend to assume: spaces for conversation with a clear purpose, moments where the full picture is visible to everyone, the discipline to distinguish what gets decided together from what doesn't, and the honesty to let go of what isn't working.

Supporting a group of leaders so they become a team in charge of a program — with shared goals and places to build agreements — isn't an auxiliary task alongside the real work. In a consortium, it is the real work.

(evange)Lina Prato is an Agile Coach and Scrum Master. She accompanied the DemocráTICa program team in designing and facilitating its spaces for synchronization, reflection, and agreement-building.