None of the recent articles have mentioned it but hollcracy is a American commercialized edit of Sociocracy aka Open Governance (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocracy).
The analogy would be how Scrum was created as a commercialized revision of Agile XP.
A key tenant is the rights of each circle (team/committee) to actively chose how it will make decisions, and it's free to use systems such as voting or putting someone "in charge", but it also has a bunch of innovative decision making approaches that achieve much better buy in and are based on achieving consent as opposed to consensus. It's the difference between, 70% of people are on board so we are going ahead regardless of what the rest think. And we'll we've heard from everyone and even those that have stated publically to try rest of the group that they have concerns they are no longer blocking "paramount" concerns and we are united in our agreeance to go ahead.
The seminal text is "We the People" (http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0979282705/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=...) [no affiliate]
The analogy would be how Scrum was created as a commercialized revision of Agile XP.
A key tenant is the rights of each circle (team/committee) to actively chose how it will make decisions, and it's free to use systems such as voting or putting someone "in charge", but it also has a bunch of innovative decision making approaches that achieve much better buy in and are based on achieving consent as opposed to consensus. It's the difference between, 70% of people are on board so we are going ahead regardless of what the rest think. And we'll we've heard from everyone and even those that have stated publically to try rest of the group that they have concerns they are no longer blocking "paramount" concerns and we are united in our agreeance to go ahead.