Every Thread at Every Level

Write for every level where rules are made.

Context

Writing about technology for people who want to build and run it together, produced by many contributors over time.

Problem

Most writing about technology stays at one level. Tutorials explain how to build something but not who decides how it’s run. Critique explains what’s wrong but not what to build. Governance writing describes rules with nothing concrete to govern. The connections between levels, which is where the rules are, go unwritten.

Forces

• Ostrom’s IAD framework nests action situations in four levels (operational, collective-choice, constitutional, metaconstitutional), and the outcomes of each level are the rules for the level below (Understanding Institutional Diversity).
• Each kind of writing fits one level: a guide answers how to do it, a governance piece answers how the rules change and who changes them, and a theory essay answers what the resource is for.
• Writers specialize. A sysadmin writes tutorials; a scholar writes critique.
• Alexander paired The Timeless Way of Building (why) with A Pattern Language (what to do) (A Pattern Language). Bollier and Helfrich’s triad of social life, peer governance, and provisioning is a similar split (Free, Fair, and Alive).

Solution

Therefore, write about each thread at every level, by giving every pattern a thread and a level and introducing it in a piece at that level.

Actions

• Guides for operational patterns, governance pieces for collective-choice and constitutional patterns, theory essays for metaconstitutional ones.
• Record each pattern’s exact level, even though governance covers two levels.
• Show empty cells in the table, so gaps are visible.

Consequences

• Positive: readers can move from idea to rule to practice within a thread, and the missing pieces are easy to see.
• Negative: assigning a level takes judgment, and some patterns sit between levels. A thread can look unfinished for a long time.