Working definition: Governance is a means of direct influence for an organization.

Governance is part of the organizational structure. It must be considered at the same time with other structural elements such as culture and ethos, methodologies, infrastructure, and organizational interface, because all these elements are interrelated and form a holistic system. In other words, it cannot be considered in abstraction of these other structural elements.

OVNs present a wide array of potential governance applications and scenarios, calling for the development of a modular pattern language which enables swift configuration of governance recipes to suit needs.

The governance of OVNs is close to the concept from biology of Multi-scale competency architecture. Subsidiarity can be a transitional state that is less costly to change.

See Wikipedia entry.
See p2pFoundation wiki entry.

Context

Here we discuss governance in OVNs. The reality is that agents can join permissionless and engage (openness), they can chose to stay for as long as they want, they must be able to swarm with all the rest, those who are there and those who have been there before their arrival. We are talking about governance that is proper for flow-through, open organic organisations.

Ways to understand governance

Primitives of governance

See Greg's text

Related to the process of organising with a common goal

Governance specifies and organises relations among agents and between agents and resources, within processes. Generally, this involves

selection: choosing by decision, decision making.
enforcement: enacting and reinforcing the choice / decision.
adaptation: inquiry or research, sense-making or structuring, informing, feedback, and adaptation.

In traditional organisations, governance is largely concentrated: a small group selects, enforces, and adapts. In P2P open networks, all three functions must be distributed across a large, permeable, changing set of participants, without centrally controlled bottlenecks. This is not a political preference; it is an information-theoretic necessity. Bar-Yam's complexity matching principle: the governance system's complexity must match the organisational complexity it manages. As the network grows and its challenges diversify, only distributed governance can keep pace.

Another way to cut it is:

decision model and free initiative (what types of decisions do we need to make)
governance mechanisms (ways to make decisions, and mappings to decision model)
governance structures (committees, offices etc. and mapping to decision model)
authority (granting specific people offices)
communication (recording and transmitting relevant and timely information)
accountability (for both making the decisions and the outcome of the decisions)

Function

confers permissions and privileges amongst actors in the OVN, related to resources, processes, networks
addresses alignment of stakeholders within a space or venture
specifies mechanisms for decision making, including triggers for the process, steps to be taken, who to involve, and how
provides the structures through which objectives are fulfilled
monitors implementation of policies and decisions for compliance

Governance should also specify the boundary conditions, regulate what goes into processes and how; in vs out; immune system.

Constitution and governance

Are constitutions, as understood in traditional terms, for traditional organisations, compatible with p2p? Should an OVN have a constitution?

From the What constitutes a constitution? paper.

...the function of a constitution is to delineate the boundaries of a particular organization or entity, entrenching elements of its composition relative to that organization’s regular processes of decision-making, as well as against the broader array of legal, social, economic, and environmental forces that make up its context(s). This constitutive function operates to reinforce the coherence of that entity in the face of both internal and external pressures, such that it can dynamically evolve through its interactions with both its members and its environment while nonetheless retaining its identity.

In this definition we see terms like: boundaries, internal and external. In p2p boundaries are not so clearly defined. If we think in terms of fractal structures, which define very well OVNs, we can speak about contexts and flows between them, zones of interaction between contexts. Constitutions have been applied to cell-like organizations, fortresses, rather than to open networks or interacting open networks or network of networks. The metaphor that we can use is the DNA of a cell, which is its constitutive infrastructure, to use a term in that same paper cited above.

An organization’s constitutive infrastructure consists of all of that organization’s implementations of the constitutive function, accounting for the relationships between these implementations

But a DNA (setting what can be done) or a skeleton (setting what type of physical motion can be achieved) are rigid structures, which are less adapted to fluid, adaptive open networks.

cannot be modified without going outside that organization’s regular process

Adaptability and fluidity are key advantages in the p2p economy as compared to capitalist and socialist models.

To be developed further...

Features of peer governance

Openness

Openness is about access to governance processes. See more on the Openness page.

Rationale: In general, openness is crucial for enabling the large scale dynamic in which resources and collective intelligence reaches the network from all over the planet. When it comes to governance, openness is leveraged to include multiple perspectives into a decision making process. Openness is based on the principle of 'equipotentiality', assuming that any human being has the potential to add something positive to the organization: principle of equipotentiality.

Important note: At the same time, the governance process is a sensitive one and thus we need to consider it as a vector of attack. Openness in governance doesn't mean that anyone can come and make decisions about everything. It means that pretty much anyone out there can earn the privilege to make decisions, which presupposes a fair process, providing equal opportunity to anyone. At the same time, the scope of a governance process or mechanism can be extended to agents that do not have access to decision making, in order to broaden the input (opinions, perspectives) into the process. Access to decision making in an OVN is granted based on past-looking considerations, we can call that merit or reputation, based on past contributions (time, money or any type of material or immaterial resource, tangible or intangible) - see more on benefit redistribution algorithm. It can also be granted based on forward looking considerations such as commitments. The second case is very present in DAOs where the commitment takes the form of staked tokens and it is enforced through smart contracts.

In closed governance systems, access to governance is granted by other actors, based on a process that relies more or less on their will, and can be formalized as a role / position in the organization. In open governance merit and future commitment are defined by an algorithm and the access to governance becomes detached from human intervention, once the algorithm has been decided (perhaps implemented as a smart contract if blockchain implementations as used like in a DAO). As a corollary, open governance assumes that these algorithms are also open (anyone can propose improvements), transparent (anyone can see how they work) and legible (they are easy to understand).

Transparency

Transparency is about access to information about governance. See more on the Transparency page.

Rationale: Transparency means that almost anyone out there can see, without the need to make a formal request for information, how the network is governed. This means unrestricted access to the operating rules (even to information about why and how these rules have been put in place), to past and current decisions, to governance processes and tools. Transparency is based on the principle of holoptism - ability for any part to know the whole, to have horizontal knowledge of what is going on, but also the vertical knowledge concerning goals and aims. The advantage is that all the nodes of the network can be aware of important choices / decisions, and of how obligations and permissions are assigned. Moreover, transparency builds trust in the system for participants, as well as for other agents that want to interact with the network.

Important note: At the same time, transparency provides real time information about important choices made by the organisation to competitive agents within the larger ecosystem, which can become a disadvantage. This is akin to the predator having access to the thought process of the pray, predicting every move even before it happens. The only defense in this situation of information asymmetry within a competitive environment is to become the lion of the savanna, i.e. to have no threatening competition in the area of the organisaton's core expertise.

Secret or closed organizations are based on non-transparent governance.

Decentralization

Decentralization is about autonomy of agents within the organisation.

Rationale: The idea is that good decisions are made by agents in context, based on local conditions. Providing autonomy, or the ability to make decisions and to play by own rules, in context, can lead to very efficient processes, assuming that these agents are aligned with the overall goals of the organisation and have the required competencies to act. We also need to take into consideration that part of the resources used within an OVN are under a private property regime (affiliates provide resources), which confers owners influence within the network. In other words, unlike in a traditional firm where all things belong to the company and all workers are not in possession of the means of production, in an OVN some affiliates are in possession of means of production. This reality makes it almost impossible to exclude these affiliates from governance, therefore centralized governance is incompatible with open networks. To expand a bit on this subject, within an OVN resources belong either to a custodian (bound by a nondominium agreement) as commons or are part of a pool of shareables or they belong to affiliates. Allocation of privately owned resources is a matter of individual informed choice or a matter of established rules in the case of shared resources. See more on Physical resource governance.

Important note: Sometimes peripheral agents making decisions based on local conditions are not aware of the big picture, and the network can loose its cohesion.

Emergent

The rules are not centralized, i.e. written as laws (ex. the 10 commandments) but emanate from agents. This is agent-centric governance, compatible with the p2p governance model (see below). This makes governance not rules based, but rather signal based, as norms emerge in real time from agent's preferences, in context, which see themselves as part of a socioeconomic system, which try to optimize their processes to achieve common goals, harmonized with individual goals.

In terms of technological infrastructure, Holochain allows for that to be implemented.

Non binary

Governance (decision-making) as signal processing, not rule enforcement. Voting is usually yes or no. When aggregated this provides only a vague information of actual preferences. New decision making methods and associated tools go beyond that. Examples are: conviction voting (Commons Stack), quadratic voting (Radical Exchange), rank choice, etc. Most of these methods are composable, which means that we can use them as basic decision-making patterns to build more complex patterns.

OVN governance is signal-based, as norms emerge in real time from agent preferences, in context." Rules assume a known, closed world. Signals are the governance of complex, open, evolving systems. In complexity economics terms: the adjacent possible (Kauffman) is never fully knowable. Rules written today cannot anticipate tomorrow's edge cases. The governance architecture must support emergence, agents should be able to propose and enact new norms through their behaviour, not just comply with pre-written rules.

This has direct implications for NDO design: the governance layer should expose proposing, voting, and adapting mechanisms as first-class capabilities, not just enforcement mechanisms.

Vertical Forms

This is about instituted power relations: Within an OVN there are no formal mechanisms through which one affiliate can control another one.

Peer production processes are structured with the help of formal systems of roles or accountabilities (describes what affiliates do) and reputation (describes how well affiliates do what they do), through voluntary subordination. Peer pressure represents a type of informal feedback loop with significant effect.

Rationale: Instituted power relations shift the focus from optimizing incentives and processes to controlling agents, which is not the best way to organize innovation and production. Instituted power corrupts. People contribute to an OVN at will and act as free agents. They should also be mindful and have a responsibility to reduce friction to a minimum, to make the network dynamic and adaptive.

Important note: Some people misunderstand the situation and in absence of some form of instituted power exerted on them they try to dominate others. Lack of instituted power is felt as a power vacuum that needs to be filled. In these cases, the network should exert peer pressure over these individuals who try to impose their tyranny on others, using well-designed mechanisms that can detect such tyrannic behavior and channel and focus resources to reduce the influence of the potential tyrant. A useful metaphor here is an immune system, which detects a malfunction that can push the organism beyond its homeostatic range.

Enablers of governance

Legitimacy - people buy into it, trust the process
Representativity - transparency in selection and representation process, see Representation
Inclusion - limits and descriptive representation, more attention to participatory
Accountability - internal and external, governance has consequences

Layers of governance

Sensorica and Metamaps are working on governance documents.

Examples from Sensorica

Network of networks governance

The OVN structure is fractal. We can see an OVN as a network with nodes (can be other OVNs) that share protocols and standards to enable open and collaborative innovation, production and distribution processes. But at the same time, this network-of-network level is also the ecosystem level, en environment where there are interactions with various type of organizations: other networks, government, market, suppliers, benefactors, etc.

Network of networks governance is like an international treaty, it governs the behavior of entities part of this ecosystem, it regulates their relationships.

One important concern at this level is the body of protocols and standards for

- Contribution accounting and transactions/exchanges - creating interoperability between ventures in different networks that are considered as autonomous open business units, and between all the organizations interacting within the ecosystem.
- Role system and Reputation system - roles and reputation need to be transportable across networks, beyond organizational boundaries,
- Content management - creating documentation that can be effectively shared and used beyond organizational boundaries,
- Physical and virtual environment - creating a unified user experience beyond organizational boundaries,

Governance must be designed to allow federation with other OVNs or other type of networks-type organizations.

Think in terms of governance protocols that can be adopted by similar organizations, or that can be easily adopted.

This is part of the growth strategy and mechanisms of the p2p economy.

See more on Networks of networks.

Network governance

Networks are clusters of interests. As social systems, they have their own identity and culture. They are also considered as loci of knowledge and know how, with specific capacity for design, production and distribution. The governance at this level is greatly influenced by the identity and the culture of this specific network, by its mission(s), as well as by the nature of its value system, i.e. the type of resources used, their availability, the nature of its internal processes, the relations it has with its environment (government, market, suppliers, benefactors, etc.).

At this level, governance is concerned with

Custodian agreement (see Legal structure)
- issuing and revoking the mandate of network Custodian to a entity
- defining its roles and its responsibilities
Network Exchange Firms
- issuing and revoking the mandate of network Exchange firms to a legal entity
- defining its roles and its responsibilities
Access to Resources (physical and virtual spaces, tools and equipment, consumables, use of brand, etc.)
Access to governance at the network level (see Governance equation
protocols and standards for
- contribution accounting and transactions/exchanges - creating interoperability between ventures within the network, considered as autonomous open business units.
- role system and reputation system - roles and reputation need to be transportable across ventures within the network
- content management - creating documentation that can be effectively used across multiple ventures within the network
- physical and virtual environment - creating a unified user experience across the network

See also Physical resource governance page. It describes the governance of physical spaces, tools and equipment as well as consumables.

Venture governance

Ventures are governed independently within a network. They are seen as open, collaborative/participatory enterprises. At this level, governance is concerned with the distribution of benefits, which is regulated by the benefit redistribution algorithm and is enforced by a benefit redistribution agreement. See also Governance equation at venture level.

Governance components

Governing bodies

See more on Organizational structure page, and read Sensorica's doc about governing bodies.

Registries

See more on the Registry page.

Registries are lists of important elements used in governance. For example, the registry of affiliates is a list that contains all current affiliates of the OVN. Other governance modules can use this list, for example when it is time to make a decision, only those included in the registry of affiliates will be considered for participating.

Often used registries

List of affiliates
List of events (pas and future) - important to verify that the event baring the OVN's name is sanctioned by OVN affiliates.
List of legitimate funding proposals - important to avoid random people sending funding proposals in the name of the OVN.
List of ventures - important to verify if venture is truly developed within the OVN.
List of digital services used by the OVN - important is one needs to know if an online service or application truly belongs to the OVN

Decision making

See Decision making page.

Body of agreements

Can be a body of smart contracts, paper contracts and a mix of both (See the Embedded and non-embedded governance section).

- Agreements vs rules**

Go back to Stephen for clarification. See the 2026, Feb 20 RIW gathering.

People, environment and purpose

From What constitutes a constitution?

Determining which people are (and by extension, are not) subject to the organization’s governance, mapping the environment that the organization operates within, and defining the purpose that animates the organization, motivating the ways that its people interact with its environment

People refers to an organization’s internal context — who it includes, how it structures the interactions between members, and the pressures that these elements exert on the organization’s boundaries from within. The organization in question draws an external boundary separating its constituent members (or “body politic”) from outsiders, by defining criteria for citizenship, membership, and/or participation. At the same time, the diversity of values, desires, and skills found among the constituent members of a given organization exerts an influence on the shape of an organization’s internal boundaries — a well-constituted organization is one with a constitutive infrastructure that adequately and accurately embodies the values and wants of its members.

Environment, on the other hand, refers to an organization’s external contexts — that is, everything that remains distinct from an organization once it is constituted. An organization’s environment exerts various forms of pressure (i.e. regulatory, legal, economic, cultural, etc.) on the shape of an organization’s boundaries from without — and, to the extent that the external environment influences how the organization chooses to conduct itself, it is able to exert pressure on the shape of the organization’s internal boundaries, as well.

Finally, an organization’s Purpose can be thought of as its mediating context — that is, as the set of attractors that orient the exercise of the various mechanisms through which the organization mediates the relationships between its internal and external contexts. When information flows from that organization’s environment to its people, its purpose informs its interpretation of that information; when information flows from its people to its environment, the organization’s purpose informs its choices (which may in turn affect its environment), and the manner of its transmission. An organization’s purpose is temporally mediating, as well; an organization moves towards its purpose through time.

People, Environment and Purpose collectively define the circumstances in which an organization constitutes itself. A constitutive infrastructure manifests and entrenches a boundary between People and Environment, mediating activity pursuant to purpose. Infrastructures by their nature enable a set of other activities, and they evolve on a slower timescale than the activities they enable⁷. Different kinds of constitutive infrastructures may have markedly different modalities for change. For example, written constitutions have “secondary rules” — the rules governing governance and its procedures — while software products have version control⁸ and Continuous-Integration Continuous-Deployment (CI/CD) frameworks⁹. What is important to recognize about both of these mechanisms for change is that they are entrenched more deeply than the infrastructures they modify. Mechanisms for adapting constitutive infrastructures may also be referred to as Governance Surfaces.

Governance process

Access to governance

Engagement

OVNs exhibit a long tail distribution, or a 1-9-90 structure, where 1% of participants in the network are core (entrepreneurial), 9% are contributors (early adapters), and 90% are occasional contributors (followers). OVN affiliates have different needs and interests, depending in which one of these 3 groups they are situated. They can also migrate between these groups. The level of openness of the network is in fact related to the mobility between these groups.

Governance must be sensitive to this universal long tail structure of OVNs. Those in the core group, the 1%, bare more responsibility and have a much larger workload on their shoulders. They are also very concerned by the viability of the network, therefore their decisions will be motivated by maintaining or improving the health of the network. Contributors, the 9% group, want to help, but are not fully committed. Those in the 90% group share the same values and act as a bridge between the network and its surroundings. It is important to understand how to compose a decision making body for a specific type of decision. See more in the following video : Samer Hassan on Online Tools to Increase Participation in Collaborative Communities.

Roles

Governance is a process and a governance system requires maintenance. Affiliates can engage in these processes and when they do, they need to understand that they are playing a specific role.

With respect to the process of governing we can identify key functions. Some of these functions can be embedded decentralized processes, some of them can be embodied as individual roles. We come from a social order where these key functions have been embodied. For example, we immediately think of leadership in terms of a person, instead of thinking about it as a process that can be entirely disembodied, or can be embodied but largely distributed (shared across a number of individuals). Think about the Bolshevik revolution of the Black Liberation movement in the US. You'll most probably see flashing the images of Lenin and of Martin Luther King. Now think about the #occupy movement and most probably you'll not have a human figure that you strongly associate wit that movement. In decentralized and distributed movements or swarms leadership is either a shared individual roles (many local leaders in coordination) or it becomes an embedded process, totally disembodied.

Key functions

coordination: fulfilling temporal and spatial requirements and dependencies between processes that form an action.
responsibility, accountability: related to determinism of a process, increase the probability of something planned to happen, as expected.
mission, vision and purpose: alignment of goals, reduces dispersion and waste of resources, diminishes the field of exploration.
motivation: source of inspiration, emotional.

In the open world we see roles such as: leaders, stewards, facilitator, coordinators, ...

Temporal aspects

With respect to decisions

Some decisions can be definitive. For others, evaluation processes should be attached to the implementation of the decision, which might invalidate the decision at some future date, or trigger revision and adaptation of the decision. -Proposed by Steve

Some decisions have an expiration date.

When it comes to agreements, they may have temporal clauses that trigger other processes. Smart contracts are programs that can have temporal parameters.

With respect to access to governance

Past-looking and forward looking considerations may be taken into account for granting access to governance. In other words, an agent's past behavior / contributions or a future engagement / commitment are indicators to consider when designing governance.

Preference voting (proposed by Commons Stack) is a continuous process whereby agents post their preferences to certain issues and can update them over time. This builds a profile of organizational preferences and informs at all times the path of minimal resistance. This is also similar to Fluid Governance, see below.

Embedded governance

Embedded governance (or immanent governance) is about engineering the environment in which action are deployed to direct, channel or shape action, to take away the possibility of undesirable or less desirable action alternatives. The true act of governance is the decision to shape the space or the process in a given way, which will subject all actors to that particular design. Once that design decision has been made and it has been implemented, the rules become embedded or immanent. For example, if we don't want people to walk into a certain area, we put up a barrier. The barrier can be suggestive (a ribbon) or a hard physical barrier (a fence).

Rules can be embedded into our physical and digital environment, into our methods and procedures, translated into our culture, embedded into our actions as customs. Embedded rules can be made unavoidable. With embedded rules, decision making shifts to the architecture of the environment, what rules to make embedded or not, and how to embed. These are technical discussions that require expertise, but network affiliates must understand, acknowledge and get behind these decisions, because they will be affected by them. Examples:

Self enforcing agreements such as smart contracts.
Physical barriers, such as a fence, is an embedded rule that says “don’t go there”. Fences can be erected in the physical and the digital spaces.

We can also distinguish between soft embedded rules and hard embedded rules, the difference between a “do not transgress” sign and a fence and wall that makes it impossible to pass.

In the p2p / blockchain language this translated into the onchain vs offchain governance.

Sensorica's governance as of January 2026 is mostly offchain (written in documents), although some governance aspects are embedded within the infrastructure. For example, all Sensorica documents are set by default as open to the public with commenting access. With the Nondominium project, Sensorica is also moving governance onchain, so to speak, as the NRP-CAS gets rebuilt on Holochain and Blockchain. Nondominium serves as the resource transfer and flow engine, designed as an organization-agnostic system that embeds governance rules directly within resource definitions. This approach enables resources to carry their own governance parameters, ensuring that transfer protocols remain consistent regardless of organizational context.

SEEDs has designed a pretty interesting onchain / ofchain governance process. They have drafted a constitution, which captures the wisdom of the SEEDs community and is ofchain. The constitution gets embedded as a game plan, where formal processes are designed and implemented as code of the p2p blockchain infrastructure. People can propose different game plans, which constitute different SEEDs networks or communities. The constitution contains most of the ethos. The game plan is game theory and it is also the link to the economic layer of the SEEDs network, incentivizing and modeling behavior for economic activities. See SEEDs Game Plan and SEEDs Constitution.

OVNs rely on stigmergy, which in turn relies on embedded governance. In other words, in order for OVNs to scale, we believe that most of the rules need to be already embedded in the design of the OVN's physical and digital environment, as well as in its methods and processes.

Blockchain - onchain/offchain governance

Onchain governance refers to smart contracts, which are self-enforcing programmable rules, i.e. programs that are implemented on blockchain-based infrastructures to execute with certainty whenever certain conditions are met. A bundle of such smart contracts form a Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) or Distributed Autonomous Corporation (DAC). Offchain governance refers to the residual rules and decision making process that are not automated in such way and rely on human action.

There is a raging debate about DAOs and onchain/offchain governance, about how much automation we can have, how much governance can be onchain and if there is a necessary requirement for offchain governance for an organization to exist.

Distinction between

Governance of the OVN - Rules and decisions about how the OVN behaves, what it does, in relation with its environment. Control resides outside of the OVN
Governance through the OVN - everything that is automated through smart contracts, autonomous machine-to-machine interaction, that regulate OVN processes.

Clarification of the source of control and authority in distributed systems is a key requirement for effective governance.

Why governance automation?

Ex. smart contracts (vending machine). Growth model: automated governance facilitates expansion of a network by addition of new nodes. Make processes more efficient, scale processes.

What cannot be automated?

Human issues: interpersonal problems, emotions, etc. cannot be automated. Where do we put these problems to be solved? Metagovernance: discussions about the rules, governance system architecture, proposition and implementation of new rules.

Who proposes changes, who makes decisions?

Infrastructure needs to support and facilitate the network. Human-centric infrastructure and governance. Let the humans finetune the algorithms.

Holochain - NDO embedded governance

The most important governance concept for the NDO is embedded governance: engineering the environment so that desirable behaviour is facilitated and undesirable behaviour is made impossible or costly, rather than relying on policing. This is about engineering the environment in which actions are deployed to direct, channel or shape action, to take away the possibility of undesirable or less desirable action alternatives.

In practice: instead of writing a rule "you must not transfer a resource without a validated custodian," make it technically impossible to record a custody transfer without a prior commitment accepted by an accountable agent. The rule is in the architecture, not in a policy document that humans can ignore.

This is also stigmergy in the complexity economics sense: governance through environmental modification. Ants do not follow written rules — their collective behaviour emerges from pheromone trails (environmental signals) that individual agents respond to locally. The NDO's capability slot surface (Layer 0 stigmergic attachment) is exactly this: governance emerges from what agents choose to attach to resources, without central coordination.

The distinction between soft and hard embedded governance matters:

Hard embedded: cryptographic impossibility of the prohibited action (Holochain validation rules, capability tokens)
Soft embedded: social norms encoded as discoverable defaults (GovernanceRules marked as required, reputation consequences)

The NDO primarily uses hard embedded governance (Holochain integrity zomes are cryptographic) with soft embedded governance at the application layer (GovernanceRules are data that agents must choose to enforce in their coordinator logic).

Tibi's view on governance

by Tibi

Rules and norms are solutions to a specific category of organizational problems. Organizations develop different types of problems as they grow and as they undertake more complex endeavors. Some of these problems are of governance-type. Setting up new rules must respond to an organizational problem [use a problem - solution pattern to propose and design new rules].

Every organization has its own specificity and transposing governance from one organization to another one is not so straightforward, especially without considering established methodologies and infrastructure.

Governance must be developed in parallel with infrastructure (tool, seen as technological solutions to a specific category of organizational problems), methodologies (processes seen as solutions to a specific category of organizational problems).

Stigmergy and Governance

This is about the idea that governance can be an emergent phenomena that relies on a very small number of principles.

Stigmergic governance relies on embedded governance, meaning that the effect of these fundamental principles are complemented by the properties of the environment, its natural or built properties.

Ants don’t have rules written somewhere. Their complex behavior is a combination between some fundamental principles that are encoded into their DNA and surfaces at the level of their morphology, nervous system, etc. and the structure of the natural environment.

Notes from meeting with the Metagovernance project and TaoDao

In the room: Tibi, Cent (Metagovernance), Daniel (Active inference lab), Ronen (metagovernance), Vini (TaoDAO), Tim.

Exploring governance and stigmergy, how these two conjugate together. Commons sense makers, stigmergy markings, open source attention.

In a social dynamic heavily driven by stigmergy rules are important but group decisions are disappearing.

We are exploring the interplay between governance and stigmergy,

Can we create a stigmergy / governance workshop? Vini says that people need to be able to reframe their attention and interest, in order to be able to sense their environment, the ecosystem. One requires an enhanced perception of the environment.

Set up a game field, see who picks it up, and those who come to the workshop, will be already selected by their awareness. Give time to incremental amounts of people. It can be an asynchronous experience. Make it easy to engage. Necessary to move the attention towards the ecosystem.

Stigmergy is like governance focused on attention. Governing our collective attention.

For stigmergy to work there is the network and the environment, and pressure from the environment that drives self-organization and optimization through stigmergy. There is a pressure for selection on the group, internal processes.

Individual trail marking. Navigate based on the aggregate distribution.

Do something that is more behavioral than rational, People react to whatever is not part of the daily business or of the routine, they REact to something and give a response. Ex. put an audio prompt on Slack, people can look at it or simply react to it. No need to prompt people to understand that that audio artifact is part of a research, just limit it to the reaction of people.

Tim: people need to connect in new ways, not just based on values, rationality, ideology. Emphasize on interactions, behavior, which has been lost in the age of modernity.

Complexity and governance

To be developed... / see Complexity

Governance and economic model

Architecture governance in a way that it becomes compatible with organizational and economic model architecture. REA is used to model the economic reality of the network, use the same structure to describe governance. Talk about Agents, Resources and Events. Talk about the Policy, Scheduling and Accountability layers, or knowledge, planning and operations.

This means: governance events are EconomicEvents. Governance policies are Resources. Governance actors are Agents. The Policy/Scheduling/Accountability layers of REA are the governance architecture, not just the economic architecture.

The implication: the NDO's zome_gouvernance, which already models EconomicEvents, Commitments, and Claims, is the natural home for governance events. A decision to grant a role is a governance EconomicEvent. A governance proposal is a Commitment. The decision outcome is a Claim.

See discussion about SEEDs in the Embedded Governance section, their chain from Constitution, to a Game plan - game theory.

Value based flow of activity and incentive systems

Instead of rules, create incentives or purposes to drive activity in a specific direction. Curren-see proposed by Arthur Brook is a good reference to start from. See also game theory, gamification, tockanization or token economy. In the end, the role of governance is to structure what we do and how we do it. Incentives can be used for the same purpose.

One approach would be to tell people to do something in a given way, and police their action, which is in fact applying negative incentives to the non respect of the rule. Another approach is to use game theory, create positive incentives for people to do something in a given way, and perhaps apply negative incentives to the opposite behavior. We expect some people to reproduce the undesirable behavior, but the same happens when we apply rules.

This is seen in parenting. Some parents use the strategy of applying incentives (giving candy, positive reinforcement) and others set rules and punishments (if you do this, that’s going to happen to you). A milder approach is by explanation, which is using rationality and the satisfaction of doing the right thing to positively incentivise desirable behavior.

Deontic Ontology

Fundamental concepts and relations that allows us to speak about decisions, rules, norms, obligation and permission, ...

- - ToDo***: We need to integrate the REA ontology used for modeling economic processes.
Agents (individuals or organizations)
- Individuals
- Network
- CELL (or Node)
- Custodian
- Exchange Firm
- Consortium
- Partner (organization of individual)

Operators: Obligation, Permission We can derive Access (to benefits or resources) from Permission?

Resource:
- Physical: materials, tools, equipment,
- Virtual

[Category|Governance]

Deontic logic

A type of logic if the field of philosophical logic that is concerned with obligation, permission, and related concepts. Alternatively, a deontic logic is a formal system that attempts to capture the essential logical features of these concepts. It is useful to formalize governance and embed it into processes, automate governance (see Embedded Governance and Onchain governance sections above). More on Wikipedia. See also This paper.

Fluid p2p governance

A new type of Governance system proposed by Tibi. Open document.

Holoncratic governance

{Produced with AI}

Refers to a system of governance based on the concept of holons — autonomous, self-reliant units that are also part of larger wholes — and holarchies, which are networks of holons organized in non-dominating, nested layers.

It builds primarily on two ideas:

Arthur Koestler's concept of the "holon":
A holon is both a whole in itself and a part of a larger whole.

Example: A cell is a whole unit but part of a tissue; a human is a whole but part of a community.

Governance implications

In holoncratic governance, authority and decision-making are distributed:
Each holon has a degree of autonomy for internal matters.
Holons coordinate with others horizontally (peer-to-peer) and align vertically with the broader purpose of the larger holarchy.
Power is not centralized; it's nested and contextual. (A holon acts independently where it has competence, but contributes to coordination at the next level when needed.)

In engineering terms:

Distributed control system where nodes are semi-autonomous but synchronize for global system functions.
No central master controller; governance is emergent, based on negotiated coordination between units.

Sensorica's OVN already displays holoncratic characteristics:

Working groups (autonomous) coordinate for projects.
No one controls the entire network.

Some DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) aim toward holoncratic models but often fall short when governance becomes centralized in practice.

Key characteristics of holoncratic governance:

Autonomy + Belonging - Units (people, teams, projects) are self-governing but contribute to a larger purpose.
Nested Structure (Holarchy) - Holons are embedded within larger holons. Decision-making adapts to context and scale.
Distributed Authority - Authority is pushed to the "lowest competent level," not held centrally.
Dynamic Coordination - Coordination arises through negotiation, agreements, and protocols — not top-down command.
Resilience and Adaptability - If a holon fails, others can reorganize dynamically; the system is fault-tolerant.
Alignment without Control - Common purpose or protocols (not rigid hierarchies) ensure coherence across holons.

Symbiocracy

Method of governance. Concept from ICV cycles.

Work in progress

Sensorica is working on OVNi 3.0 Governance, an improved version of Sensorica's governance, compatible with a p2p IT infrastructure.

Governance as operator

The Governance-as-Operator Architecture has been implemented for the first time in Nondominium (lead by Tibi and Sacha). This important architectural choice is the separation of data from governance logic:

zome_resource: pure data model — creates and stores ResourceSpecification, EconomicResource, GovernanceRule entries without enforcing any business logic
zome_gouvernance: state transition operator — the resource zome requests transitions, the governance zome evaluates the applicable rules and approves or rejects them

The governance logic can evolve without touching the data model, different governance schemes can be applied to the same resource types, and governance is independently testable.

This architecture is the NDO's most principled contribution to governance design, it directly implements the OVN insight that governance must be compatible with the economic model (REA), because governance and economics are handled by the same zome operating on the same entry types.

Tools

OVN Governance canvas
loomio - web app helping people making decisions, consensus-based, made by ENSPIRAL
cogov software layer built on Holochain

Praxis

See implementation by Sensorica.

External links

Governance