Add governance tags

[DougInAMug]

e.g. #membership, #decision-making, #conflict-resolution, etc.

Reference to an existing ontology strongly preferred.

[asimong]

Maybe we could not add raw tags as such, but look at the different conceptual models / ontologies that people bring to this space? How would you describe the space in more detail?

[gcassel]

Tags could be very helpful, but I think it's important to go about that carefully, because they depend on context. I.e. all knowledge is essentially "semantic triples", such as "This artefact (or organization) has this trait in this context"-- and, context includes language, dialect, community and relationship, etcetera. (Note that I'm not trying to overly-complicate things: some tags, such as #decision-making , would probably be practically "universal" in English-language contexts.)

FWIW I have two related open source repositories, Modular Organizing Terminology (MOT) and IOT. MOT has over 700 (maybe 800 now) interrelated technical definitions; IOT is relatively tiny and new, with a stricter mission to provide definitions at a level of technical rigor which might be comparable to what you need. (Some MOT definitions are already sufficiently strict IMO, so I use them as needed instead of adding unnecessarily to IOT.)

Not many of my github definitions are compound terms such as decision-making or conflict-resolution. There are definitions for decide, conflict and resolve, and for create which is a synonym for make; however, it's unnecessary and risky to create compound definitions by some automated or algorithmic computation of what term A plus term B supposedly means. Compound definitions should IMO be created by humans.

While some MOT terms, and most if not all of the early IOT terms, have sufficient technical rigor for Collective Governance Directory, I'd never advise anyone to simply import them to a specific project. They ought to be reviewed, and either adopted, adjusted or discarded on a case-by-case basis. For me personally, they're always a helpful (evolving) touchstone, even when they don't show up formally.

[DougInAMug]

@gcassel thanks very much for the effort you've put into those resources, and your nuanced comment here. I'll have a look at IOT, and deeper at MOT, and likely come back to you about it :)

Rules can be tagged according to the rules classification by Elinor Ostrom. In the center of her IAD-Framework is the »action situation« with seven variables and every variable is affected by an according rule.

Source: Understandig Institutional Diversity (Elinor Ostrom), p.189

• Position Rules: The number of possible "positions" actors in the action situation can assume (in terms of formal positions these might be better described as job roles, while for informal positions these might rather be social roles of some capacity
• Boundary Rules: Characteristics participants must have in order to be able to access a particular position
• Choice Rules: The action capacity ascribed to a particular position
• Aggregation Rules: Any rules relating to how interactions between participants within the action situation accumulate to final outcomes (voting schemes etc.)
  Information Rules: The types and kinds of information and information channels available to participants in their respective positions
• Pay-off Rules: The likely rewards or punishments for participating in the action situation
• Scope-Rules: Any criteria or requirements that exist for the final outcomes from the action situation
  Source: Wikipedia - IAD-Framework

I never used these categorization to tag existing rules, but I would love to try it out.

[DougInAMug]

@marcusmeindel I've been skimming through several Ostrom et. al. publications about rule tyology. The clearest and most detailed I've found is Ostrom E. Understanding institutional diversity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press; 2005. pg 193 - 210

I also found several publications looking to apply the typology:

• Dunlop CA, Kamkhaji JC, Radaelli CM, Taffoni G. Measuring design diversity: A new application of Ostrom’s rule types. Policy Studies Journal. 2022 May;50(2):432–52.
• Schweik CM, Kitsing M. Applying Elinor Ostrom’s Rule Classification Framework to the Analysis of Open Source Software Commons. Transnational Corporations Review. 2010 Jan;2(1):13–26.
• https://complexity.asu.edu/sites/default/files/papers/cbie_wp_2018-006_0.pdf

I will meditate and reflect on what I've been reading. There is a glimmer of hope: 7 is an elegant number (number of rules in the typology) and there is a strong academic interest. However, the categorization is not simple (as many secondary authors testify) and my intuition tells me there's something non-pragmatic about it.

[DougInAMug]

https://radhr.org/policies/ - the project closest to this one that I could find - define 30 "policy areas" which I would say overlap strongly. As far as I can tell, this is an 'ontology-by-abduction', i.e. common-sense + intuition + experience.