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Governance Archaeology Database: v1.2

Documentation

Last updated: May 2024

• Name: The name of the community with collective governance practices.
• Community:
• Institution:
• Collective governance institution: Any structure where a group of more than one person gathers to make decisions on behalf of the community.
• Mechanism: A text description of a specific governance practice or rule. In this database, mechanisms are grouped into three broad categories: access, defining access to the instutition; decision-making, regulating decision-making processes; and enforcement, guiding enforcement practices.
• Geography:
• Time span: Written text description of the centuries in which the community existed in history.
• Time span: start: Starting century encoded as integers, with negative numbers denoting BC, and positive numbers denoting AD.
• Time span: end: Ending century encoded as integers, with negative numbers denoting BC, and positive numbers denoting AD.
• Size: The number of members in the community. While some communities may have additionally granular size encodings, community size is generally bucketed in the following groups:
  • 1 - 10
  • 11 - 100
  • 100 - 1,000
  • 1,001 - 10,000
  • 10,001 - 100,000
  • 100,001 - 1,000,000
  • 1,000,001 - 10,000,000
  • 10,000,000+
  • Unknown
• Source: Source material documenting community information.