Summary

Create a governance discipline under the agential semioverse. Governance is where policy lives — the discipline that studies how habits form, stabilize, and get revised. It is the home for planning infrastructure, decision-making processes, and the theory of repository self-organization.

Motivation

Governance content is currently scattered:

  • Policies live in personal/projects/emsemioverse/policies/
  • Plans live in technology/specifications/.../plans/
  • The concept of policy lives in the ASR spec concepts
  • Governance theory lives in emsemioverse texts (anarchism, organism, encoding loop)
  • Planning best practices live in slop

There is no discipline directory that owns this material. A governance discipline would:

  • Define the vocabulary (policy, plan, decision, governance, habit-formation, closure-pressure)
  • Collect methods (consent-based decision-making, BDFL model, lazy consensus, dependency-based prioritization)
  • House the theory (how j manifests as governance, how policies crystallize under closure pressure)
  • Provide a home for governance research and advisory reports

Steps

  1. Create governance/ directory with standard ASR structure (terms/, concepts/, texts/, methods/, questions/).
  2. Define core governance terms: governance, policy, plan, decision, consent, mandate, habit, closure-pressure.
  3. Move or link governance-relevant concepts from their current locations.
  4. Write an AGENTS.md for the governance discipline.
  5. Write the discipline’s methodology (how governance research is done in the emsemioverse).
  6. Determine where governance sits in the formal hierarchy — is it a top-level discipline, or does it belong under a parent?

Done when

  • governance/ directory exists with standard ASR structure
  • Core governance terms defined
  • AGENTS.md written
  • Methodology documented
  • Position in formal hierarchy determined

Dependencies

None.

Log

2026-03-07 — Created. Listed in TODO.md as unplanned work since earlier this session; now has a proper plan.