Grow the Platform Bigger, or Make It Smaller? KangAi Commune's Deeper Expectation for a Stronger Community Adjudication Panel

Some members suggested that KangAi Commune hire professional legal staff to handle disputes, arguing that the Community Adjudication Panel is too inefficient and cannot fully resolve problems. This suggestion is quite reasonable, and it prompted some reflection. Behind it lie two different development paths: one is to grow the platform bigger and stronger, and the other is to make the platform smaller and hand more power to members.

Under the first approach, the platform should keep strengthening its own capabilities — hiring more professionals, including legal, medical and customer-service staff — so that it solves problems more professionally and efficiently. The benefits are obvious: potentially higher efficiency and better service. But correspondingly, operating costs will keep rising, members will grow increasingly dependent on the platform, and ultimately all responsibility and pressure will remain concentrated on the platform itself.

The other approach is exactly the opposite. Through the Community Adjudication Panel, we hope members will take part in dispute adjudication, public deliberation and amendment of the community covenant, gradually returning to members some of the power the platform once held. This approach has its drawbacks. Members are not professionals, their willingness to participate is uneven, and the efficiency of discussion and adjudication may not be high. Especially on professional legal questions, the Community Adjudication Panel genuinely cannot replace lawyers, let alone judicial authorities.

But it has one very important value: it allows the Commune to gradually shed its dependence on the platform's individual judgment, and to build the capacity to rely on members' collective participation, to manage itself and to correct its own errors. In the long run, I believe this capacity may matter more than how many professionals the platform has.

Of course, this does not mean we reject specialization. Legal issues should be resolved according to law, and professional issues should heed the advice of professionals. The legal responsibility the platform must bear cannot be shifted to members just because the Community Adjudication Panel exists. What we truly want to explore is this: professionals provide support for professional matters, members decide public matters together, and the platform does its best to provide service and assurance.

That the Community Adjudication Panel is still inefficient precisely shows we still have much work to do. How to simplify procedures, raise participation, bring in professional support and clarify adjudication authority — these are all problems to solve next.

KangAi Commune has been through fifteen years. In the past we kept trying to make the platform better, but now we increasingly feel that the true maturity of a mutual-aid organization may not be a platform that keeps getting stronger, but members who become increasingly capable of managing their own common affairs. The platform can be smaller, but its responsibility cannot shrink; members can hold more power, but they must also bear more responsibility.

This path may not be easy, nor necessarily cheaper or more efficient than hiring professionals. But if it can be walked through, KangAi Commune will no longer be just a mutual-aid platform sustained by an operating team, but may become a mutual-aid community that can truly run on its members over the long term. This is the deeper expectation behind our building of the Community Adjudication Panel.