This is my shorthand title for: > Individualised Support Groups
A Towel Group is a sociocracy-inspired circle that holds the shared responsibility for personalised Needs Assessment for Hitchhikers and Fellows.
It is not a “carer role” and not a single heroic coordinator. It is an organised volunteer team with clear boundaries, lightweight governance, and a reliable service offer: helping precarious and neurodiverse Hitchhiker talent get the conditions they need to contribute safely and sustainably.
The name comes from Hitchhiker Lore: the towel is a practical object that signals preparedness, care, and calm competence under chaos.
# Purpose The Towel Group exists to reduce the hidden cost of participation.
It does this by running a repeatable, consent-based needs assessment workflow, producing practical working agreements, and ensuring those agreements actually shape tasks, meetings, and support offers.
The group protects against two failure modes: 1. People masking until they burn out, and 1. Leaders accidentally designing roles that exclude the very people we most want to include.
# Core service offer The Towel Group offers a small menu of services, so volunteers can deliver consistently and members know what to expect.
The basic offer is a short onboarding conversation (or async equivalent) that results in a one-page Working Agreement owned by the member.
A second offer is Role Shaping: translating a person’s constraints and strengths into a set of tasks that fit, sized for timebank contribution.
A third offer is Support Routing: connecting a member to the right internal support (buddy, documentation, tooling, access needs, conflict support), without oversharing personal information.
# Sociocracy structure A sensible sociocratic structure is one circle with a few roles, plus micro-circles only if load increases.
The default is a single Circle called “Towel Group” that makes policy by consent and runs operations by clear role accountabilities.
If demand grows, split into sub-circles by function rather than by “type of person”, to avoid stigma and to keep knowledge reusable.
# Roles inside the circle A minimal role set keeps it operable without turning it into bureaucracy.
- Facilitator: holds meeting process, consent rounds, and keeps the circle healthy. - Secretary: maintains documentation, templates, decision log, and the service backlog. - Intake Steward: triages requests, schedules sessions, and ensures consent and scope are clear. - Needs Listener: runs assessment conversations and drafts working agreements with the member. - Work Shaper: helps translate needs into task design and participation patterns with project leads. - Confidentiality Steward: maintains privacy norms, redaction patterns, and access controls for sensitive notes. - Timebank Steward: tracks time credits, ensures the work is bounded, and keeps volunteering sustainable.
One person can hold multiple roles at first, but roles must be explicit so handovers are possible.
# Timebank implications Timebank volunteering creates a strong constraint: the service must be deliverable in small, well-scoped pieces. Therefore, the Towel Group should design its work in “service packets” with known durations, so volunteers can pick up units without becoming trapped in open-ended care. Example packets: “30-minute intake”, “45-minute needs conversation”, “30-minute agreement draft”, “15-minute follow-up check-in”, “30-minute role shaping session with a lead”. This implies internal discipline: every request is turned into a bounded packet, logged, and either accepted or deferred, with clear expectations communicated to the member.
# Workflow A simple workflow keeps quality high. Intake receives a request and offers the lightest suitable pathway: async form, short call, or immediate routing to a buddy. Needs Listener runs a conversation focused on actionable constraints and preferences, not medical narratives, and produces a draft working agreement. Member edits and approves the agreement, chooses what can be shared, and names the contexts where it applies. Work Shaper coordinates with the relevant project lead to ensure task design aligns, sharing only what is necessary. Follow-up happens after 2 to 4 weeks to adjust the agreement based on reality.
# Boundaries and safeguarding The Towel Group does not do therapy, diagnosis, or crisis care. It is a participation-support service, with clear escalation pathways when safeguarding or professional support is required. Volunteers need scripts for boundaries, and the circle needs a policy for when a case is “too complex for volunteers” and must be referred.
# Information handling The member owns their needs profile. The Towel Group stores the minimum required, with a default of “working agreement only” and optional private notes that never leave the circle. Sharing is always explicit: what is shared, with whom, for what purpose, and for how long. A simple rule is “preferences travel, stories do not.”.
# Coordination with the rest of Hitchhikers The Towel Group must have a formal link to decision-making, otherwise agreements will be ignored under pressure. Sociocracy provides this via Double Linking: one person from the Towel Group sits in the relevant governance circle, and one person from governance sits in the Towel Group, ensuring feedback and constraints flow both ways. This prevents the towel team becoming a powerless advice desk.
# Capacity planning Because needs work is emotionally and cognitively demanding, the circle should actively manage load. Use a visible service backlog, limit work in progress, rotate roles, and maintain a “quiet month” option for volunteers. Timebank accounting should include not just sessions, but admin overhead, documentation, and decompression time.
# Failure modes The biggest failure is becoming an invisible, informal care network where a few kind people burn out. The second failure is becoming a compliance bureaucracy that extracts personal data and produces documents nobody uses. The third failure is losing trust through sloppy confidentiality, which would push neurodiverse and precarious members back into masking.
The structure above is designed to avoid all three.
# See - Needs Assessment - Working Agreement and Onboarding - Sociocracy, Circle and Double Linking - Timebank, Volunteers and Hitchhikers - Neurodiversity, Precarity and Safeguarding