# Town Meeting

> Town Meeting is mapped as the commons: it structures public authorization, contestation, participation, and accountability.

| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Stable ID | `node:kiduna:political-change:democratic-forms:town-meeting` |
| Family | Democratic Forms |
| Domain | Governance |
| Kind | institution |
| Archetypal function | The Commons |
| Epistemic status | synthesis; supported |

## Concrete anchor

Town Meeting belongs to the **Democratic Forms** family. It is treated as a specific political object, role, institution, tactic, event, ideology, or mechanism before any symbolic transfer is made.

## What it does

Town Meeting structures public authorization, contestation, participation, and accountability, changing who can act, what becomes visible, and which costs are distributed to others.

## Who gains and who loses power

The mechanism can increase the capacity of actors able to use Town Meeting, while shifting cost, delay, risk, exclusion, or dependence toward actors with less authority, information, organization, money, or safe access. The distribution is conditional, not an essence of the node.

## Archetypal function

**The Commons.** Town Meeting is mapped as the commons: it structures public authorization, contestation, participation, and accountability.

## Gift

makes rulers removable and conflict governable; through Town Meeting, that capacity becomes available for deliberate use.

## Wound / Shadow

reduces democracy to elections or masks unequal voice; Town Meeting can then reproduce the very arrangement it claims to change.

## Conditions

- scale and jurisdiction are explicit
- affected people and absent stakeholders are named
- time horizon and countermoves are considered

## Strategic meaning

Use Town Meeting to identify the operative target, resource, dependency, decision forum, and likely countermove. Ask what would make the mechanism stronger, weaker, more legitimate, or less necessary.

## Divinatory meaning

The Commons enters through Town Meeting. Read for the capacity seeking expression, the cost displaced from view, and the relationship that changes if the frame moves.

**Question:** What changes when Town Meeting becomes the unit of analysis rather than background?

## Game function

**leverage.** Reveal one hidden dependency connected to Town Meeting; another player names a countermove. Initiative 1.

## Relationships

- **amplifies — Recall:** Recall amplifies Town Meeting by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(synthesis; supported)_
- **translates into — Council Democracy:** Town Meeting translates into Council Democracy by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(synthesis; supported)_
- **counteracts — Oslo Accords:** Town Meeting counteracts Oslo Accords by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(interpretive; tentative)_
- **amplifies — Sectoral Bargaining:** Sectoral Bargaining amplifies Town Meeting by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(interpretive; tentative)_

## Countermaps and polarity prompts

- Read Town Meeting from the viewpoint of the actor who bears its cost.
- Reverse cause and symptom: what if Town Meeting is an effect of the system it appears to drive?
- Change the clock: what looks different over a day, an election cycle, a generation, and a century?
- Ask when the Gift becomes the Wound through scale, secrecy, intensity, latency, or unequal reciprocity.

## Epistemic and Sentinel note

Claim layers: synthesis, interpretive, symbolic_divinatory. Scope, jurisdiction, period, and source perspective may change the claim.
No node-specific Sentinel factors were recorded; ordinary source, audience, and context checks still apply.

## Visual direction

A text-free enamel expression of Town Meeting: one dominant mechanism, one counterforce, raised warm-metal linework, midnight field, restrained civic red, teal, ivory, and amber. No party logo, national flag, sacred symbol, or recognizable person.

## Research / provenance

- [V-Dem Dataset and Codebook](https://www.v-dem.net/data/the-v-dem-dataset/) — V-Dem Institute, 2026. Comparative measurement of democratic institutions; indicators remain model-based measures.
- [Freedom in the World Methodology](https://freedomhouse.org/reports/freedom-world/freedom-world-research-methodology) — Freedom House, 2026. A rights-and-liberties assessment framework; one institutional perspective among several.
- [Introduction to Political Science](https://openstax.org/details/books/introduction-political-science) — OpenStax, 2022. Comparative institutions, political behavior, and public policy foundations.

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Engine Output version 1.0.0; generated 2026-08-24T00:00:00Z. Sentinel annotations are stored separately in `sentinel/handoffs.json`.
