Objective-Based Voluntary Organization (OBVO) Enable people, organizations, and agents to accomplish shared objectives through voluntary, transparent, measurable, and efficiently coordinated action while minimizing unnecessary reliance on political and coercive processes. This plan proposes infrastructure through which individuals, organizations, communities, service providers, funders, and artificial intelligence agents can discover shared or complementary objectives and organize around them without first establishing conventional organizations or relying upon political processes. It builds upon capabilities demonstrated by civic-organizing platforms such as Murmuration while generalizing them beyond electoral, advocacy, and policy campaigns. The central organizing unit is the objective rather than the organization, constituency, jurisdiction, political party, or campaign. ^^ The plan does not propose eliminating government or political processes. Some collective objectives require legitimate governmental authority, protection of rights, enforcement of agreements, provision of public goods, or resolution of conflicts that cannot adequately be addressed through voluntary arrangements. Instead, the plan proposes enabling shared objectives to be pursued through less coercive means whenever those means can produce equal or better results. ^^ StratML provides a standardized, machine-readable framework for expressing intentions, stakeholders, objectives, and performance information and therefore may serve as an interoperability layer for objective-based virtual organizations. ^^ Submitter's Note: This plan has been compiled and rendered in StratML format in dialog with ChatGPT. It has been lightly edited in the form at https://stratml.us/forms/Claude/Part1.html No One in Particular NOIP _b4941838-7a3a-40b2-ac00-19ae55fd90c5 While this plan has no official sponsor, anyone who supports its mission could do so by helping to build the necessary tools, apps, and services. A society in which people can efficiently discover shared purposes, organize voluntarily, coordinate resources, and achieve measurable results with minimal unnecessary dependence on political or coercive processes. _a0b45ca3-ad94-4cb6-894b-b5ddcf7dc032 To develop and promote standards, tools, services, practices, and infrastructure enabling objective-based virtual organizations to form, operate, measure results, learn, and evolve. _16137d37-7414-4646-864b-86119f989706 Voluntary Association Enable people and organizations to choose freely whether, how, and with whom they collaborate. Subsidiarity Address objectives at the least centralized level capable of achieving the intended results effectively. Transparency Make intentions, responsibilities, resources, processes, evidence, and results appropriately visible to affected stakeholders. Accountability Evaluate participants, organizations, services, and approaches according to evidence of their contributions to intended results. Choice Preserve opportunities for stakeholders to select among competing objectives, organizations, providers, approaches, and services. Interoperability Use open standards and interfaces to enable intentions, information, services, and results to cross organizational and technological boundaries. Efficiency Minimize unnecessary transaction costs, bureaucracy, meetings, intermediation, duplication, and coercion in achieving shared objectives. Evidence Use measurable results and credible evidence to compare alternatives, improve decisions, and support continuous learning. Intentions Enable individuals, organizations, communities, and agents to express intended results in structured, machine-readable form. _4cb2fd15-ed8c-4f46-8263-b46c2315f741 1 Objective Owners Express, publish, maintain, and refine objectives they seek to achieve individually or collaboratively. Individuals Express personal or shared intentions and discover opportunities to contribute voluntarily to compatible objectives. Organizations Publish organizational intentions in machine-readable form so their objectives can be discovered, related, supported, evaluated, and coordinated with those of others. Communities Express shared needs and intended results without requiring those intentions to be mediated exclusively through conventional organizations or political institutions. AI Agents Help stakeholders express, structure, refine, relate, translate, and maintain intentions in machine-readable form. StratML Community Develop, implement, promote, and improve standards and practices for expressing strategic and performance plans in machine-readable form. Objective-based organization begins with intentions rather than institutions. Conventional organizations commonly form first and subsequently determine what their members will try to accomplish together. This plan reverses that sequence where practicable: intentions are expressed first so that compatible stakeholders can discover one another and determine whether collaboration would be useful. StratML provides a standardized structure for expressing goals, objectives, stakeholders, and related information. Expression Enable stakeholders to express goals and objectives clearly and in machine-readable form. _b75ff4f5-0dcc-49b0-8ba9-dcdb617f6e58 1.1 Google Docs Provides Web-based collaborative document creation and editing that can be used to develop, refine, and share statements of intentions, plans, and related information.^ https://docs.google.com/ Google Sheets Provides Web-based collaborative spreadsheets that can be used to structure objectives, stakeholders, resources, indicators, and other planning and performance information.^ https://sheets.google.com/ GitHub Provides version-controlled repositories and collaborative services through which structured plans, schemas, documentation, software, issues, discussions, and related information can be developed and maintained.^ https://github.com/ Claude.ai Has compiled authoring/editing forms for StratML Parts 1 & 2: ^^ * Strategic Plans ~ https://stratml.us/forms/Claude/Part1.html ^ * Performance Plans & Reports ~ https://stratml.us/forms/Claude/Part2.html ChatGPT Has provided prompts and a service enabling users to transform unstructured text into StratML format: ^^ * https://stratml.us/references/StratML-Prompting-Guide.html Publication Enable intentions to be published at stable, addressable, and discoverable locations. _2388214e-d129-421b-b673-30ac58ca82dd 1.2 Google Sites Provides Web-based creation and publication of sites through which VOs can make intentions, information, resources, and results accessible on the Web.^ https://sites.google.com/ GitHub Pages Provides Web publication directly from GitHub repositories, enabling plans, documentation, project sites, and other persistent resources to be made publicly accessible.^ https://pages.github.com/ Interoperability Enable intentions to be exchanged among applications and services without dependence upon proprietary formats or platforms. _ea35ab12-a19a-4c5f-9c53-7d839fff3703 1.3 Matrix Provides an open protocol for decentralized communications enabling participants to communicate across independently operated services without requiring reliance upon a single centralized provider.^ https://matrix.org/ Nextcloud Provides open-source, self-hostable file, communication, and collaboration capabilities supporting organizational control and portability of information and services.^ https://nextcloud.com/ Relationships Identify relationships among complementary, overlapping, supporting, dependent, competing, and conflicting objectives. _50f1b3dd-5c34-476f-88eb-0b91a9d65826 1.4 Wikidata Provides a collaboratively maintained, machine-readable knowledge base in which entities and relationships among them can be identified, referenced, queried, and reused by people and applications.^ https://www.wikidata.org/ Discovery Enable stakeholders, objectives, capabilities, resources, evidence, and services to discover relevant counterparts efficiently. _6b29f7fa-734b-48cc-ac40-62fd95252790 2 Objective Seekers Search for existing objectives to which they may wish to contribute, relate their intentions, or offer resources and capabilities. Prospective Collaborators Discover people, organizations, communities, and agents pursuing objectives compatible with their interests and capabilities. Resource Providers Offer funding, facilities, technology, information, expertise, services, or other resources potentially useful in achieving objectives. Researchers Provide evidence, knowledge, methods, and findings relevant to objectives and alternative means of achieving them. Discovery Service Providers Index and relate objectives, stakeholders, capabilities, resources, evidence, plans, and results so relevant counterparts can discover one another. AI Matching Agents Identify relationships among objectives, stakeholders, capabilities, resources, evidence, and prospective collaborators. AboutThem StratML Search Service Provides search and discovery of machine-readable goals, objectives, stakeholders, values, sources, and other information contained in the StratML collection.^ https://search.aboutthem.info/ Discovery services should extend beyond finding people who may support a predetermined campaign. They should enable people, organizations, funders, service providers, researchers, and AI agents to find objectives they may wish to support and enable objectives to be matched with stakeholders possessing relevant interests, capabilities, information, or resources. ^^ The AboutThem StratML Search Service at https://search.aboutthem.info/ provides an existing implementation supporting discovery of goals and objectives, stakeholders, values, sources, and full-text content in the StratML collection. It demonstrates a foundation upon which more advanced objective, stakeholder, capability, evidence, and service discovery and matching capabilities may be developed. Objectives Enable stakeholders to find existing objectives matching or complementing their intentions before creating duplicative initiatives. _6c142f41-871c-45fb-b88c-b794b271ca79 2.1 Google Search Provides general Web search through which stakeholders can discover published plans, objectives, organizations, initiatives, resources, and related information.^ https://www.google.com/ GitHub Search Provides search across repositories, users, issues, pull requests, code, and other publicly accessible resources that may reveal existing initiatives and objectives before duplicative efforts are begun.^ https://github.com/search Stakeholder Matching Match objectives with people, organizations, communities, and agents having relevant interests, responsibilities, capabilities, or needs. _53f04bb4-3c08-4fea-bee2-381862947cd3 2.2 GitHub Enables prospective collaborators to discover individuals and organizations through repositories, profiles, contributions, issues, discussions, and other evidence of interests and capabilities.^ https://github.com/ Wikidata Query Service Provides structured queries over Wikidata entities and relationships that may assist in identifying people, organizations, subjects, locations, and other stakeholders relevant to objectives.^ https://query.wikidata.org/ Capability Matching Identify knowledge, skills, technologies, services, facilities, funding, data, and other resources potentially useful in achieving objectives. _7bd469a1-6fdd-4ac7-8b27-4cffd34a450b 2.3 Hugging Face Hub Enables stakeholders to discover, evaluate, share, and use AI models, datasets, applications, and related machine-learning resources that may provide capabilities required by VOs.^ https://huggingface.co/ GitHub Enables stakeholders to discover software, technical resources, reusable components, developers, organizations, and demonstrated capabilities potentially applicable to VO objectives.^ https://github.com/ Capability Access ~ VOs need not own or purchase capabilities required to pursue their objectives. Individuals, organizations, businesses, governments, philanthropies, communities, and other providers may make tools, applications, services, facilities, information, expertise, infrastructure, or other capabilities freely available to VO participants. ^^ Freely available does not imply costless production. Providers may bear costs altruistically, recover them through other operations, make unused or marginal capacity available, offer free service tiers, provide public goods, or otherwise choose not to charge VO participants directly. ^^ Discovery and matching services should enable requirements associated with objectives to be matched dynamically with offers of capabilities, including offers whose providers may be unaware of particular VOs that could benefit from them. Evidence Discovery Connect objectives with relevant research, experience, performance information, and evidence concerning alternative approaches. _5ff87a8e-985c-4209-9208-4c97a2d684d7 2.4 Google Scholar Provides search and discovery of scholarly literature that may supply research, evidence, methods, findings, and prior analyses relevant to VO objectives.^ https://scholar.google.com/ Zenodo Provides an open general-purpose repository for discovering, sharing, preserving, versioning, and citing research publications, data, software, presentations, and other outputs.^ https://zenodo.org/ Open Science Framework Provides free, open-source infrastructure for creating, linking, discovering, and sharing research plans, data, materials, code, publications, and other evidence associated with research activities.^ https://osf.io/ Wikidata Query Service Provides machine-readable querying of structured knowledge and relationships that may help locate and relate evidence relevant to VO objectives.^ https://query.wikidata.org/ Organization Enable virtual organizations to coalesce dynamically around shared objectives without requiring unnecessary institutional or political intermediation. _8805b791-7c08-4d7c-9e49-47163c2441e9 3 Virtual Organizations Coalesce around shared objectives and coordinate contributions without requiring unnecessary permanent organizational structures or political intermediation. Participants Choose whether and how to contribute knowledge, effort, resources, services, funding, or other capabilities toward shared objectives. Beneficiaries Receive intended benefits and provide information concerning needs, preferences, experiences, and results. Coordinators Facilitate relationships, commitments, dependencies, communications, and activities required to pursue shared objectives. Service Providers Provide specialized capabilities that virtual organizations need without requiring those capabilities to be maintained internally. Funders Voluntarily provide financial resources to objectives, organizations, projects, services, or activities they choose to support. AI Coordination Agents Reduce the transaction costs of asynchronous collaboration by maintaining context, identifying dependencies, facilitating communications, and coordinating follow-up. Voluntary Organization ~ An objective may serve as the nucleus around which a virtual organization forms. Participants need not belong to the same permanent organization, reside within the same political jurisdiction, attend synchronous meetings, or agree about unrelated matters. ^^ Participation can be limited to the objectives on which interests sufficiently align. ^^ Such organizations may be temporary or persistent and may coexist, cooperate, compete, divide, merge, or dissolve as circumstances and stakeholder preferences change. Formation Enable willing stakeholders to establish collaborative relationships around shared or complementary objectives. _66097396-9b0d-40c6-84ed-a64b5208bc1a 3.1 Google Groups Enables participants to form groups for discussions, collaborative communication, and shared interests using Web and E-mail interfaces.^ https://groups.google.com/ Discourse Provides hosted and open-source infrastructure through which communities can form and maintain persistent discussions, chat, searchable knowledge, and participant relationships.^ https://www.discourse.org/ Zulip Provides open-source, topic-organized communication supporting distributed communities and organizations whose participants collaborate asynchronously and in real time.^ https://zulip.com/ Element Provides decentralized communication and collaboration based upon the Matrix open protocol, enabling groups to organize without dependence upon a single communications provider.^ https://element.io/ Minimal Formation ~ Formation of an objective-based virtual organization need not require incorporation, legal personality, geopolitical domicile, ownership of assets, a treasury, employees, contractual relationships, or financial transactions. A VO may form when willing participants associate themselves and their contributions with a shared or complementary objective. ^^ Capabilities required to pursue an objective may remain under the ownership and responsibility of the participants or independent providers supplying them. Legal, financial, insurance, contractual, or other institutional arrangements may be invoked when particular activities require them rather than being prerequisites for formation of the VO. ^^ This approach distinguishes the persistent coordination structure represented by the VO from jurisdiction-specific legal entities or service providers that participants may choose to use for particular purposes. Roles Enable participants to declare responsibilities, capabilities, interests, contributions, and other roles associated with objectives. _1bbd4aa8-9f4c-4732-815f-d8f56730e9d5 3.2 GitHub Enables participants to assume differentiated roles and permissions in repositories, organizations, projects, issues, discussions, reviews, and other collaborative activities.^ https://github.com/ GitLab Provides repositories, projects, groups, permissions, issues, assignments, reviews, and related mechanisms through which responsibilities and roles can be associated with collaborative work.^ https://gitlab.com/ Trello Provides boards, lists, cards, member assignments, due dates, and related mechanisms for representing responsibilities associated with collaborative activities.^ https://trello.com/ Commitments Record voluntary commitments of actions, resources, services, information, funding, or other contributions toward objectives. _a292c3c0-7a42-4a14-9bf8-5a7711d016ff 3.3 GitHub Issues Provides persistent issues, assignments, labels, milestones, dependencies, discussions, and related records that can document activities and commitments undertaken by collaborators.^ https://github.com/features/issues GitLab Issues Provides issue tracking, assignments, due dates, discussions, relationships, and workflows through which collaborative commitments and their status can be documented.^ https://gitlab.com/ Trello Provides cards, assignments, checklists, dates, attachments, and status-oriented boards that can be used to record and track voluntary commitments toward objectives.^ https://trello.com/ Choice Enable participants to join, leave, support, compete with, or establish alternative objective-based organizations subject to legitimate commitments and obligations. _37061d48-a771-4e20-9705-c7a673e2de1e 3.4 Matrix Provides an open federated communications protocol enabling participants and organizations to choose independently operated service providers while communicating across provider boundaries.^ https://matrix.org/ Nextcloud Provides open-source collaboration software that can be self-hosted or obtained from competing providers, supporting participant choice and reduced dependence upon a single platform operator.^ https://nextcloud.com/ Discourse Provides open-source community software that may be hosted independently or obtained as a service, enabling communities to retain alternatives concerning how their collaborative environment is operated.^ https://www.discourse.org/ Asynchronous Collaboration Enable participants to coordinate effectively without requiring synchronous meetings except when they add sufficient value. _b7358a15-a601-45c6-a02c-9938bbca3da1 3.5 Gmail Provides widely accessible asynchronous E-mail communication through which geographically and organizationally distributed participants can exchange information and maintain persistent communications.^ https://mail.google.com/ Google Groups Provides group-based E-mail and Web discussions enabling distributed participants to communicate asynchronously around shared subjects and activities.^ https://groups.google.com/ Google Docs Enables distributed participants to create, edit, comment upon, review, and maintain shared documents without requiring simultaneous participation.^ https://docs.google.com/ Discourse Provides persistent topic-based discussions, searchable archives, E-mail integration, notifications, and chat supporting asynchronous community collaboration.^ https://www.discourse.org/ Zulip Provides topic-organized conversations designed to enable participants to follow and resume relevant discussions without having to be continuously present.^ https://zulip.com/ GitHub Discussions Provides persistent discussion forums associated with repositories and projects through which collaborators can ask questions, exchange ideas, make announcements, and maintain community knowledge.^ https://github.com/features/discussions Element Provides persistent rooms, messages, files, threads, and other decentralized communication capabilities over the Matrix network for distributed collaboration.^ https://element.io/ Identification Enable participants and agents to identify themselves and establish appropriate credentials, attributes, authentication, and authorization without requiring unnecessary disclosure of personal information. _e6b9bb63-21de-4ab8-88b2-08b89ca93d8a 3.6 Identity Service Providers Provide identifiers, authentication, credentials, attributes, authorization, and related trust services appropriate to differing levels of identity assurance. Google Account Provides widely used account identification and authentication capabilities for accessing Google and participating third-party services.^ https://accounts.google.com/ GitHub Provides persistent user and organization accounts, profiles, authentication, contribution histories, permissions, and related identity information for distributed collaboration.^ https://github.com/ ORCID Provides persistent identifiers enabling individuals to distinguish themselves and connect their identities with research, professional activities, affiliations, contributions, and outputs.^ https://orcid.org/ Solid WebID Provides decentralized Web identifiers for agents that can be associated with stakeholder-controlled data and used across interoperable applications and services.^ https://solidproject.org/ Sign in with Google Enables participants to use existing Google Accounts to authenticate with third-party applications and services without requiring each VO to establish and maintain its own username and password infrastructure.^ https://www.google.com/account/about/sign-in-with-google/ Sign In with LinkedIn Provides OpenID Connect authentication enabling participants to use existing LinkedIn accounts to authenticate with participating applications and share authorized profile information without requiring each VO to maintain separate authentication credentials.^ https://www.linkedin.com/developers/ Facebook Login Enables participants to use existing Facebook accounts to authenticate with participating applications and services rather than requiring each VO to establish separate user-login infrastructure.^ https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/ Sign in with Apple Enables participants to use existing Apple Accounts to authenticate with participating applications and websites while providing privacy protections and avoiding separate passwords for each service.^ https://developer.apple.com/sign-in-with-apple/ Microsoft Identity Platform Provides standards-based authentication and authorization services enabling applications to accept existing Microsoft personal, work, school, and other supported identities.^ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity-platform/ Federated Identification ~ Objective-based virtual organizations should not require participants to establish new usernames, passwords, identity records, or authentication infrastructure when suitable existing identity services can be used. Where practicable, VOs and their supporting applications should accept interoperable or federated identities supplied by independent providers chosen by participants. ^^ Identification should be distinguished from authentication, credentialing, authorization, and real-world identity verification. Authentication may establish that a participant controls a particular account without proving the participant's civil identity, qualifications, organizational authority, reputation, or other attributes. Additional credentials or verification should be required only when appropriate to the responsibilities, risks, commitments, and consequences associated with an activity. ^^ Participants may appropriately use public identities, organizational identities, professional identifiers, social-network identities, pseudonyms, or other identifiers in different circumstances. Higher-assurance credentials may be required when participants exercise consequential authority, assume significant responsibilities, access protected resources, make binding commitments, or perform activities requiring verified qualifications. ^^ Identity services should be substitutable where practicable. A VO should avoid becoming unnecessarily dependent upon a single identity provider and should preserve relationships among participants, objectives, roles, commitments, contributions, and results when participants change identity or authentication services. ^^ Persistent identifiers such as ORCID and Solid WebID may complement authentication services by providing durable references to participants or agents across applications and organizational contexts. Gatherings Enable participants to convene synchronously, virtually or physically, when doing so adds sufficient value to achieving objectives or strengthening collaborative relationships. _f3796c88-b56f-4e0f-98f4-ef1c4bc6224d 3.7 Gathering Service Providers Provide communications, scheduling, venue, event-management, accessibility, facilitation, and related capabilities supporting useful synchronous interaction. Google Meet Provides browser-based video meetings and related synchronous communication capabilities for geographically distributed participants.^ https://meet.google.com/ Jitsi Meet Provides open-source browser-based video conferencing that can support synchronous interaction without requiring VOs to operate their own conferencing infrastructure.^ https://meet.jit.si/ Zoom Provides video meetings, webinars, screen sharing, messaging, and related synchronous communications capabilities.^ https://zoom.us/ Google Calendar Provides scheduling, invitations, availability, reminders, and integration with online meeting services to help distributed participants coordinate synchronous gatherings.^ https://calendar.google.com/ Meetup Provides discovery, organization, scheduling, and participation services for online and in-person gatherings among people sharing interests and purposes.^ https://www.meetup.com/ Purposeful Synchrony ~ Synchronous gatherings can provide value for relationship building, rapid interaction, sensitive or complex discussion, collaborative creativity, training, celebration, social connection, physical activities, and circumstances in which immediate feedback is useful. ^^ They should complement rather than unnecessarily replace persistent asynchronous communications and records. Information, decisions, commitments, evidence, and other results arising from synchronous gatherings should be captured in persistent forms when they are relevant to continuing pursuit of the objective. ^^ Physical gatherings need not imply that a VO possesses facilities or has a geographic domicile. Participants may use homes, workplaces, community facilities, commercial venues, public spaces, donated facilities, or other locations made available by independent providers. Decisions Enable participants to deliberate upon alternatives, make necessary collective decisions, and maintain transparent records of their rationale and results. _42959418-03c2-44f4-84ef-e67ec5b465ac 3.8 Decision Participants Consider evidence, alternatives, stakeholder interests, tradeoffs, and consequences when collective choices are required. Decision Support Service Providers Provide deliberation, polling, voting, prioritization, consensus, analysis, facilitation, documentation, and related capabilities supporting collective decision-making. Loomio Provides collaborative discussion, proposals, polls, voting, decision records, and related capabilities enabling groups to deliberate and make collective decisions.^ https://www.loomio.com/ Decidim Provides open-source infrastructure supporting proposals, deliberation, consultations, participatory processes, meetings, voting, accountability, and other forms of collective decision-making.^ https://decidim.org/ Polis Provides open-source technology for gathering open-ended participant input and identifying patterns of agreement and disagreement across large groups.^ https://pol.is/ Decision Minimalism ~ Objective-based voluntary organizations need not establish elaborate governance processes merely because participants collaborate. Many activities can proceed independently on the basis of declared objectives, roles, voluntary commitments, delegated responsibilities, and transparent performance information. ^^ Collective decisions should be made when coordination actually requires a shared choice, such as selecting among incompatible alternatives, allocating shared resources, establishing common rules, resolving dependencies, accepting commitments on behalf of the VO, or changing shared objectives. ^^ Decision processes should be proportionate to the significance, reversibility, affected stakeholders, risks, and consequences of the decision. Depending upon circumstances, appropriate methods may include individual or delegated authority, consent, consensus, polling, voting, prediction, experimentation, competitive alternatives, or other decision mechanisms. ^^ Where practicable, deliberation and decision-making should occur asynchronously so participants have adequate opportunity to consider evidence and alternatives without requiring simultaneous attendance. Synchronous deliberation may be used when it adds sufficient value. ^^ Consequential decisions should produce persistent records identifying the choice made, relevant alternatives, participants or authorities involved, supporting evidence and rationale where appropriate, commitments arising from the decision, and subsequent results. Such records can enable AI agents and other stakeholders to preserve institutional memory, evaluate decision quality, and learn from outcomes. Performance Enable objective-based organizations to coordinate action and demonstrate progress through measurable results. _9d099a35-118e-4396-8780-04e4a21a20d1 4 Performers Accept responsibility for activities, outputs, outcomes, or other contributions associated with objectives. Beneficiaries Provide evidence concerning whether intended results are producing value for those they are meant to benefit. Performance Analysts Develop indicators, analyze evidence, compare actual results with intended results, and identify opportunities for improvement. Evaluators Assess the effectiveness, efficiency, credibility, externalities, and other consequences of alternative approaches. Funders and Resource Providers Use performance evidence to determine whether continued or additional commitments of resources are warranted. Competing Providers Offer alternative approaches whose performance can be compared on the basis of intended and actual results. Accountability in voluntary arrangements depends heavily upon credible information about performance. StratML Part 2 can provide a common structure for relating inputs, processes, outputs, outcomes, performance indicators, targets, and actual results to objectives. This enables stakeholders to evaluate alternatives without relying solely upon institutional reputation, political authority, promotional claims, or organizational affiliation. Coordination Coordinate contributions, activities, dependencies, resources, and responsibilities around explicitly defined objectives. _4d7bda80-2db7-404a-881f-9ed6cb4f0a08 4.1 GitHub Projects Provides adaptable tables, boards, roadmaps, custom fields, charts, issues, pull requests, status information, and automation for coordinating and tracking collaborative work.^ https://github.com/features/issues Google Sheets Provides shared Web-based spreadsheets through which distributed participants can coordinate activities, responsibilities, resources, schedules, dependencies, and status information.^ https://sheets.google.com/ Measurement Establish performance indicators and measures appropriate to intended results. _31bc9054-2b2a-4516-a981-428d19cb5752 4.2 Google Forms Provides Web-based forms and surveys through which VOs can collect structured measurements, observations, assessments, registrations, feedback, and other performance information.^ https://forms.google.com/ Google Sheets Provides collaborative spreadsheets and computational functions through which performance data can be recorded, calculated, analyzed, and related to indicators and intended results.^ https://sheets.google.com/ Grafana Provides open-source and hosted capabilities for querying, monitoring, visualizing, and alerting upon data from multiple sources through configurable dashboards.^ https://grafana.com/ Results Capture actual results and relate them to objectives, indicators, resources, activities, and outputs. _b20a4bb3-241f-4e40-adff-8b41c683ab35 4.3 Metabase Provides open-source and hosted analytics capabilities through which VOs can query, analyze, visualize, and share data concerning activities and actual results.^ https://www.metabase.com/ Zenodo Provides persistent repositories, identifiers, versioning, citation, and preservation for datasets, software, reports, publications, and other evidence documenting VO outputs and results.^ https://zenodo.org/ Comparison Enable stakeholders to compare alternative providers, organizations, approaches, and interventions using credible performance evidence. _34ad1a32-de42-452c-bf54-63f8d049b5fb 4.4 Looker Studio Provides interactive reports and dashboards through which performance information from multiple sources can be visualized and compared to support evaluation of alternative providers, approaches, and results.^ https://lookerstudio.google.com/ Learning Apply evidence from results to improve objectives, methods, resource allocation, and subsequent action. _f3d36ca7-f74e-44fa-afc2-d44911037a0c 4.5 Open Science Framework Provides open infrastructure for organizing and sharing research plans, data, materials, code, publications, and other evidence that can support learning from experience and improvement of subsequent action.^ https://osf.io/ Zenodo Provides persistent preservation, versioning, identification, discovery, and citation of research and other outputs that can support cumulative learning across VOs and over time.^ https://zenodo.org/ AI & Digital Services Apply interoperable digital services and artificial intelligence to reduce the cost and complexity of objective-based collaboration. _4fde8838-9511-4439-9b82-1820f5a52d4c 5 Software Developers Develop applications, interfaces, agents, repositories, analytical tools, and other capabilities supporting objective-based organization. AI Service Providers Provide artificial intelligence capabilities for objective expression, discovery, matching, analysis, coordination, monitoring, and learning. AI Agents Act within authorized roles to discover information, analyze alternatives, facilitate coordination, monitor performance, and support participants pursuing objectives. Data and Knowledge Service Providers Maintain and provide information needed to understand objectives, stakeholders, circumstances, resources, evidence, and results. Standards Developers Develop and maintain interoperable specifications enabling objective and performance information to cross application, service, organizational, and jurisdictional boundaries. Application and Platform Providers Provide interoperable environments in which stakeholders can discover objectives, organize, collaborate, transact, measure results, and maintain institutional memory. Users Exercise choice among tools and services and provide experience, requirements, and feedback supporting their improvement. Intelligent Infrastructure ~ AI agents can substantially reduce the transaction costs that have historically made decentralized collaboration difficult. They can continuously discover related intentions, identify prospective collaborators, analyze alternatives, summarize evidence, identify dependencies, recommend resources, monitor indicators, detect changed circumstances, preserve institutional memory, and facilitate asynchronous coordination. Human stakeholders should retain appropriate authority over consequential commitments and decisions. Objective Agents Enable AI agents to assist stakeholders in expressing, refining, discovering, relating, and monitoring objectives. _a8755572-7f8e-46a1-93d7-a774532eb810 5.1 ChatGPT Provides artificial intelligence capabilities that can assist stakeholders in expressing, structuring, refining, researching, relating, analyzing, and monitoring objectives and associated information.^ https://chatgpt.com/ Claude Provides artificial intelligence capabilities for analyzing information, developing and refining plans, researching alternatives, working with documents and data, and assisting stakeholders in pursuing objectives.^ https://claude.ai/ Gemini Provides artificial intelligence capabilities for developing, researching, analyzing, and refining objectives and related information, including customizable Gems and research capabilities.^ https://gemini.google.com/ Coordination Agents Enable AI agents to reduce the administrative burden of matching participants, maintaining context, coordinating contributions, and identifying required follow-up. _03daf77c-ab35-4772-820a-475441fa1724 5.2 ChatGPT Provides AI assistance and extensible connections to tools and information that can help participants maintain context, analyze dependencies, coordinate work, identify follow-up, and perform authorized actions.^ https://chatgpt.com/ Claude Provides AI assistance capable of maintaining and analyzing collaborative context, working with project information, developing artifacts, and assisting participants in coordinating complex activities.^ https://claude.ai/ Gemini Provides AI assistance integrated with research and other Google services that can help participants analyze information, maintain context, and coordinate activities associated with objectives.^ https://gemini.google.com/ GitHub Copilot Provides AI-assisted software-development and agent capabilities that can help distributed collaborators analyze repositories, implement changes, and coordinate technical work associated with shared objectives.^ https://github.com/features/copilot Service Orchestration ~ AI coordination agents may substantially reduce the burden of establishing and operating objective-based virtual organizations by helping participants select, configure, connect, and use complementary tools, applications, and services supplied by independent providers. ^^ Subject to appropriate authorization, an agent might help establish communications channels, identify and invite prospective participants, configure shared repositories and workspaces, schedule gatherings, maintain calendars, record commitments, organize discussions, retrieve evidence, coordinate workflows, invoke analytical services, monitor performance indicators, preserve institutional memory, and prepare or publish updates concerning objectives and results. ^^ The agent need not own or replace the underlying services. Its role may instead be to maintain awareness of the VO's objectives, stakeholders, roles, commitments, information, service relationships, and performance requirements and to coordinate appropriate capabilities across multiple providers. ^^ Such orchestration should preserve participant choice and provider substitutability. Where practicable, agents should use open standards, documented interfaces, and portable data so that VOs can replace particular applications or providers without losing their objectives, relationships, commitments, evidence, or operational history. ^^ Consequential actions should remain subject to authorization appropriate to their risks and effects. Agents may recommend, prepare, coordinate, and perform routine actions autonomously where authorized, while commitments, expenditures, disclosures, access grants, legal actions, or other consequential decisions may require explicit human or organizational approval. Knowledge Maintain persistent machine-readable knowledge concerning objectives, stakeholders, commitments, evidence, decisions, activities, and results. _abf67d0b-5bb3-4400-824a-1421de7e0be1 5.3 Solid Provides open interoperable standards and personal online data stores enabling information to remain under stakeholder control while authorized applications, services, and AI agents access and operate upon it.^ https://solidproject.org/ GitHub Provides persistent version-controlled repositories through which machine-readable plans, documentation, software, issues, discussions, decisions, and other institutional knowledge can be maintained and shared.^ https://github.com/ Hugging Face Hub Provides version-controlled repositories and discovery services for models, datasets, AI applications, collections, and related knowledge resources that can be shared and reused across participants and organizations.^ https://huggingface.co/ Services Enable competing and complementary applications and services to operate upon shared objective and performance information. _66cffdc6-fd1d-421a-8507-cfae200db5c3 5.4 Google Provides complementary Web, communication, collaboration, publication, data collection, analytical, mapping, video, and artificial intelligence services that VOs may combine according to their requirements.^ https://www.google.com/ GitHub Provides interoperable repository, software-development, issue-tracking, project, discussion, automation, publication, and AI-assisted services usable by distributed collaborators.^ https://github.com/ GitLab Provides integrated and self-hostable repository, software-development, issue-tracking, project, automation, and collaboration services usable by distributed organizations and communities.^ https://gitlab.com/ Hugging Face Provides repositories, discovery, hosting, datasets, models, applications, APIs, and other services supporting development and reuse of artificial intelligence capabilities.^ https://huggingface.co/ Nextcloud Provides open-source and self-hostable file, communication, groupware, office, and collaboration services that can be composed according to VO requirements.^ https://nextcloud.com/ Composable Services ~ VOs should be able to use complementary tools, applications, and services supplied by multiple independent providers rather than being required to adopt a single integrated organizational platform. ^^ Services may be commercial, philanthropic, governmental, community-supported, open source, advertising-supported, cross-subsidized by other operations, or otherwise made available without direct charges to VO participants. ^^ Where practicable, VOs should rely upon access to capabilities rather than ownership of infrastructure and should be able to substitute competing services without losing their objectives, stakeholder relationships, commitments, performance information, or institutional memory. Portability Enable stakeholders to retain and transfer relevant information when changing applications, providers, or organizational arrangements. _1202d954-6522-4f2c-8094-76f039e3debe 5.5 Solid Separates stakeholder-controlled data from applications so authorized services and AI agents can operate upon shared information while stakeholders retain the ability to change applications and data providers.^ https://solidproject.org/ Git Provides distributed version control enabling repositories and their histories to be copied, transferred, synchronized, and maintained independently of any single hosting provider.^ https://git-scm.com/ Matrix Provides an open federated communications protocol enabling communications to cross independently operated service providers and reducing dependence upon any single communications platform.^ https://matrix.org/ Nextcloud Provides open-source and self-hostable collaboration capabilities supporting organizational control of information and alternatives among hosting and service arrangements.^ https://nextcloud.com/ Noncoercion Achieve shared objectives through the least coercive arrangements capable of producing acceptable results. _9b3d86c1-8558-4070-a6be-e45e23374692 6 Individuals Choose among individual, collaborative, contractual, commercial, philanthropic, community, political, and governmental means of pursuing objectives. Voluntary Associations Enable people to pursue shared objectives through consensual collective action. Businesses and Service Providers Offer goods, services, technologies, and organizational arrangements through which stakeholders may achieve objectives voluntarily. Cooperatives and Mutual Organizations Enable stakeholders to pool resources and capabilities and provide services through jointly governed voluntary arrangements. Philanthropic Organizations Fund and support voluntary approaches to public, community, and individual needs where such approaches can produce beneficial results. Community Organizations Address shared needs through locally grounded knowledge, relationships, resources, services, and collective action. Government Organizations Exercise legitimate public authority where objectives cannot adequately be achieved through less coercive arrangements and enable voluntary approaches where governmental intervention is unnecessary. Public Officials Consider whether governmental action is necessary and proportionate and whether objectives can be achieved more effectively through less coercive alternatives. Taxpayers Benefit when public purposes can be achieved effectively with lower compulsory resource requirements and greater reliance upon voluntary arrangements. Affected Parties Identify intended and unintended consequences of alternative approaches, including effects upon people who are not direct participants in an objective-based organization. Least-Coercive Effective Action ~ Collective action does not necessarily require political action. Depending upon the objective, alternatives may include individual action, voluntary collaboration, mutual aid, contracts, cooperatives, associations, markets, philanthropy, insurance, standards, certification, technology, community organizations, and other arrangements. Political and governmental mechanisms remain necessary for some purposes, including protection of rights, legitimate enforcement, adjudication, and public goods for which less coercive arrangements are inadequate. The intent is therefore not categorically to reject politics or government but to avoid unnecessarily converting social, economic, technical, organizational, and community problems into political conflicts. Alternatives Identify voluntary, contractual, cooperative, technological, market-based, philanthropic, and other nonpolitical approaches to shared objectives. _9fd77ff9-0593-46be-a36f-c68e9b80fd1b 6.1 Open Collective Provides transparent financial administration and fiscal-hosting services through which groups may obtain access to financial capabilities without necessarily establishing and maintaining their own legal entities and administrative infrastructure.^ https://opencollective.com/ VolunteerMatch Connects organizations and initiatives seeking voluntary assistance with individuals wishing to contribute their time, skills, and capabilities to causes and activities they choose to support.^ https://www.volunteermatch.org/ Kiva Provides a platform through which individuals can voluntarily supply capital to borrowers and initiatives rather than relying exclusively upon conventional financial or governmental intermediaries.^ https://www.kiva.org/ Subsidiarity Address objectives at the smallest and least centralized level capable of achieving acceptable results. _9f5db64b-eec6-4492-bc0b-f0ee4fad709a 6.2 Competition Enable alternative approaches and providers to coexist and compete on the basis of stakeholder choice and demonstrated results where practicable. _b058a18e-0a69-443b-b916-f8663dbe8da0 6.3 AlternativeTo Provides discovery and comparison of alternative applications and online services, enabling stakeholders to identify competing means of obtaining capabilities and reduce unnecessary dependence upon particular providers.^ https://alternativeto.net/ Direct Action Enable stakeholders possessing compatible objectives to contribute directly to desired results rather than relying unnecessarily upon political intermediaries. _3dafe712-b045-4901-8b03-130d9e111d33 6.4 VolunteerMatch Enables individuals to discover opportunities to contribute their time and capabilities directly to organizations and activities addressing causes they choose to support.^ https://www.volunteermatch.org/ Idealist Connects individuals with organizations, volunteer opportunities, jobs, events, and other opportunities for direct participation in activities intended to produce social benefit.^ https://www.idealist.org/ Escalation Use political or coercive mechanisms when legitimate shared objectives cannot adequately be achieved through less coercive arrangements. _defdd25b-8d40-4a4e-a0dd-615b38e919e2 6.5 Comparison Compare political and nonpolitical approaches using evidence concerning effectiveness, efficiency, choice, externalities, coercion, sustainability, and stakeholder outcomes. _0b5490ce-abe1-4930-bfd1-d6314f7ca815 6.6 Researchers and Evaluators Compare alternative approaches using evidence concerning outcomes, costs, efficiency, coercion, choice, externalities, sustainability, scalability, and stakeholder effects. Decision Makers Use comparative evidence to select among voluntary, commercial, cooperative, community, political, and governmental approaches to achieving objectives. Our World in Data Provides accessible data, research, visualizations, and comparative evidence concerning major social, economic, environmental, technological, demographic, and other outcomes that may assist stakeholders in evaluating alternative approaches.^ https://ourworldindata.org/ 2026-09-02 https://stratml.us/docs/OBVO.xml Owen Ambur Owen.Ambur@verizon.net