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# System prepended metadata

title: Thresholding

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# Thresholding
This explores the threshold of a membrane and how it relates to agents, what agents do to cross thresholds, and how their interaction and behavior contributes to engaging other thresholds. 

Agents progress from the lightest engagement to deeper contribution. As they do so they also may increase their involvement with governance. These two aspects relate but also can be developed somewhat independently. Some contributors might night engage in governance much, while others are focused on it. What we do here honors both paths. 

Agents in most groups step through, five possible stages:
* **visitor**: curious stage, lurking, reading. 
* **participant**: contributes to content, writing. 
* **editor**: improves content, stewards coherence, write and edit.
* **steerer**: participant or editor helping steer direction through governance actions. Those who decide how the rules/principles are applied.
* **shaper**: editor who shapes how steering happens. Often the progenitor, and if that role has been transferred to a governing board, the members of that board. Those who can change the rules/principles.

Groups might create many subsets of any of these. And, most groups will implicitly or explicitly have these.

Tangled together here are access to membranes and permissions/authority within those membranes. Along with explicitly or implicitly gained trust/responsibility/accounability.

So we offer a solution that addresses these as a set. We begin with these questions:
* how does one cross the threshold into a membrane?
* are there additional membranes for the increasing capability: read, write, edit, and the governance abilities of delete, hide, move, create meta structures?
* what behavioral inputs, tracked by machines, and social inputs visible as "reactions" contribute to a clear game path towards the available roles listed above?
* how does an individual agent know their status in the game? (I want to become an editor, to do that I need x credits)
* can roles act as badges or credentials to enter other membranes?
* Does an agent develop a passport listing their roles in membranes (and what they have done and need to do to change roles)? Is that visible and sharable? 

Table: Roles, Reputation, Permissions, Influence


| Role     | Visitor | Participant | Editor | Steerer | Shaper | 
| -------- |-------- | -------- | -------- | ------- |-------- |
| <b>Purpose</b>   |Discover | Develop content| Content Strategy | Govern Process | Change Process |
| <b>Credit</b>   | Presence | Post/Comment| Ordering | Proposal/Votes | Structural change |
| <b>Permission</b> |View     | View/Write | Write/Change |Governance application |Governance changes |
| <b>Authority</b>  |What one sees | What is said | Priority of what is said |How it is said |Why it is said |


Table shows the role, what is required to begin that role (what threshold/criteria must be met), what access that grants to content, what access it grants to governing tools, what the system is noticing (giving credit for).

What the system is noticing describes the ways someone participates as micro-events. It might be tracking how many times someone visits, how many actions they take, or how long they are a member. These are the "objective" actions the system records. They may also be subjective, agent to agent. Was a contribution given a thumbs up, rated, or other reaction? These are generalized in the table, but they need to be specific and computational in each instance. For example, a we app might require 5 visitor logins before someone can become a participant, which gives them the ability to participate. Participation might be contributing a combined posting and commenting of 100 times before getting to be an editor. And editors might have a subjective reaction to peers as a process to align around who can be a steerer. 

Reactions are micro-events from agent to agent. Different groups may choose different reaction systems, the governance of those systems (only positive reaction or include negative reactions) and the computation of micro-events: signing in counts for 2 points, a like counts for 5 points, and scores are added, for example. 
Here we have sought to describe a generalized pattern or grammar that enables specific groups to customize their requirements for a threshold while having a clear process for those requirements and the roles/permissions/authority those create.

# Use Cases

## Collaborative Writing Application
To make use of this pattern, we propose the creation of a collaborative writing application that uses roles, a writing process, and the thresholding described here.

In a collaborative writing environment, we see roles such as reader/viewer, writers, editors, and a strategy governance level of shaper and steerer. The governance level is probably lightweight until the system reaches more than ~25 people. And certainly when it exceeds 140. Collaborative writing of a single artifact probably requires very little governance, but for our use case, let's consider the Thrivable Society Quarterly (TSQ) Magazine. As a quarterly magazine, the TSQ may also have guest editors. 

**Roles:**
* Readers
* Fellows:
    * Writers
    * Artists
    * Editors
    * Guest Editors
* Steerer/Shaper as Anchor Members

Those roles engage in multiple membranes of activity, where membranes are limiting access and transform content as they move through the process of refinement and layout. 

**Membranes:**
* All public instances of the TSQ (visible to public readers)
* Draft Issue - Layout
    * This situates the content in a format with art focused on readability
* Draft Issue - Editing
    * This may have multiple phases, including structural edits, narrative edits, and grammar edits
* Draft Issue - Writing
    * This membrane might be specific to an article with only the writer and the editorial team able to engage with it.
* Draft Issue - Strategy
    * This membrane focuses on setting the vision for the quarterly instance and includes more brainstoming on what the content is and who might be invited to contribute. 

## Intentional Community Use Case
We can also use this in the case of an intentional community which has multiple thresholds for participation that come with different levels of responsibility and access.

## Clarifying Governance in Organizations
We imagine this being useful for organizations and teams seeking clear distinctions of access and steps to growth across multiple applications.

## Gaming
Of course this can be used to support gaming with leveling up of a character granting new abilities and levels. 

## Federations

