Post-Hierarchy Glossary

A mode of interaction in which the system knows each participant’s identity and records their actions, while participants cannot see one another’s identities and do not know the cluster’s full membership.

Anonymity reduces the influence of status, reputation, personal relationships, and interest pressure on evaluation, while accountability allows the system to preserve competence history, reward contribution, and apply rules of responsibility. This is not unaccountable anonymity: identity is hidden from other participants, not from the system itself.

Art assessment distinguishes two authors: the artist who created the work and the brainstormer who submitted an insight about it. The artist’s name may be public, while the brainstormer’s identity is not disclosed to other participants. Participants assess the merits of anonymously submitted ideas, and the platform preserves the connection between each participant and their contribution.

Related concepts: Impartial assessment · Objectivizing decidement

A mode of decidement in which a decision is treated as a testable intervention and its consequences are systematically fed into the next cycle of evaluation and correction.

In complex systems, not all consequences can be predicted accurately in advance. Implementation therefore becomes part of learning: observable indicators are defined, results are collected, unintended consequences are recorded, and a new project is formed when necessary. Adaptive decidement replaces the one-off model of 'we decided' with a continuing cycle of 'decide – test – learn – adjust'.

A group of people whose living conditions, opportunities, rights, risks, or everyday experience are materially changed by the decision under consideration.

An affected group does not automatically own the decision, and its position is not automatically correct, but its experience is a relevant source of knowledge for decidement. In a post-hierarchical architecture, a channel must exist through which affected people's knowledge can genuinely change the formulation of the problem and the resulting solutions rather than remain a symbolic consultation.

A person who wants to participate in a cluster but does not have enough system-recorded history in relevant specializations to enter immediately as a brainstormer.

AI may generate questions for the applicant from the thematic core of the application and its important periphery. The purpose is not to grant a formal certificate but to test whether the person understands the problem field well enough to move to the next stage of participation.

The dynamically changing set of people who participate in analysing an application or problem during the lifetime of a particular cluster.

New participants may join, members may take part in different projects, and under accountable anonymity they do not need to know the group's full composition. When the cluster closes, the group disperses; results and the memory of individual contribution remain, but no standing committee does.

A full participant in collective decidement who may evaluate the ideas of others, submit solutions of their own, and contribute to the collective result according to their relevant competence.

A brainstormer does not hold a universal expert title. The participant accumulates different specialization weights through real contribution in previous projects, so influence is contextual rather than status-based. In a new application, sufficient weight in a relevant specialization may allow direct entry as a brainstormer; otherwise the applicant-and-candidate pathway applies.

An applicant who has reached a sufficient knowledge score and has been admitted to evaluate real cluster ideas in shadow mode.

A candidate cannot yet submit solutions of their own, and their evaluations do not affect the collective result. Their real evaluation profile is used to determine whether the person can judge reliably in a live decidement environment and can progress to brainstormer status.

A platform-recorded unit that a participant may accumulate for valuable contribution to the collective-intelligence process.

CI currency is one instrument for accounting for contribution and motivation alongside specialization weights and possible financial compensation. It may record created value, but it is not a formal title of authority and does not by itself confer a right to control future decisions.

In cultural assessment, a valuable contribution recorded in points can be rewarded with theatre or concert tickets or book vouchers. This economic benefit is tied to participants’ efforts to understand and assess impartially. The accounting function of CI currency remains distinct from the competence-related function of a specialization weight.

Related concepts: Social reward · Decommercialisation

A clearly formulated outcome of cluster work specifying what should happen next with the application or with one of its questions.

A resolution may call for continuation, revision, funding, an experiment, additional conditions, transfer to another group, termination, or another next step. A resolution is not an immutable verdict: if implementation produces significant new evidence, the question may return to a new decidement cycle.

The capacity of people who anonymously propose ideas and assess one another’s contributions within a single interactive platform to jointly create an understanding of a problem or solutions that no participant possessed before interaction.

Collective intelligence is not a survey, a sum of votes, a consultation, or an aggregation of separately formed opinions. It emerges when some participants' ideas change what others can notice, evaluate, and propose, while this interaction generates new solutions, questions, or a new structure of the problem. Participation becomes collective intelligence only when interaction can change the shared outcome.

In this model, people themselves determine the value of a work and of the ideas submitted about it. Algorithms organise interaction, aggregate participants’ assessments and calculate points and the influence of specialization weights. A large number of people or AI agents working separately does not in itself constitute this form of collective intelligence.

Related concepts: Objectivizing decidement

A group or community that, through organised interaction, can form a shared understanding of a problem, produce solutions, and sustain action rather than merely aggregate individual opinions.

A city, school, professional community, or other group does not become a collective subject simply by having many members. It requires an infrastructure in which participants can see, evaluate, and extend one another's ideas and create a new shared outcome from them. The will of a collective subject is not given in advance; it emerges through the process.

An initially unknown shared reference point of evaluation that emerges from competent, weighted, and interacting evaluations.

Collective wisdom is not known in advance and is not simply the majority position. A rational participant's strategy is not to push a private interest but to predict as accurately as possible which ideas will be recognised as strongest after interaction within a competent group. This aligns individual judgement with an attempt to 'hit the collective wisdom'.

While assessing an idea, participants cannot see a pre-published aggregate score that they could simply repeat. In seeking to ‘hit’ collective wisdom, they help bring it into being by drawing on the work or problem under examination, arguments and consistent principles of assessment. Reward rules connect this intellectual effort with participants’ personal benefit.

Related concepts: Reverse prisoner’s dilemma

A sufficient combination of participants' relevant specialization weights, their diversity, and their complementarity to begin competent collective work on a particular project.

This is not a headcount. A small but complementary group of strong specializations may have greater cognitive capacity than a large crowd poorly matched to the problem. At the beginning, relevance may be estimated using AI-generated orientation, but the project's actual competence structure can be refined as the work develops.

An organised and iterative process of diagnosing a problem, generating ideas, evaluating them, forming solutions, monitoring their implementation, and, when necessary, reopening the decision process.

Decidement is broader than voting, consultation, or ordinary brainstorming. It includes discovering the structure of a problem, generating alternatives, anonymous evaluation, separating new questions, identifying specializations, accounting for contribution, forming resolutions, and feeding implementation results back into the process. A decision is treated not as the end of the process but as the beginning of another learning cycle whenever reality produces new evidence.

In collective decidement, people anonymously propose ideas and assess one another’s contributions within a single platform. The process may also produce a reasoned assessment of a work of art. Participants then jointly examine what makes the work valuable, what it achieves and which shortcomings can be identified on reasoned grounds.

Related concepts: Reasoned insight · Objectivizing decidement

A group of participants brought together by a shared subject, field, application or problem, together with its collective decidement workspace on the platform.

Several decision projects may operate within a cluster either simultaneously or sequentially. Participants may change and join during the process, while new questions may generate new projects or be transferred to other groups. The cluster closes when its tasks have been resolved, transferred, or no longer justify continued work. A cluster is not a standing committee or a permanent organisational unit.

In an arts cluster, knowledgeable participants can undertake separate projects devoted to particular works. The cluster defines a shared field of activity, while each project has a clearly bounded question. In a particular art assessment project, a participant draws both on knowledge of the field and on personal experience of the work.

Related concepts: Decision project / brainstorm · Experiential competence

A distinct task within a cluster in which ideas addressing a specific problem or question are generated and evaluated anonymously.

A single cluster may contain many interconnected projects. New projects can emerge from earlier results, discovered contradictions, or missing knowledge. If a question requires a substantially different configuration of specializations, it may be transferred beyond the current cluster. Each submitted idea should, as far as possible, be self-contained and independently evaluable.

An art assessment project focuses on one work or a clearly specified aspect of it. Separate projects may examine the characters, plot and language of the same book, but every idea submitted within a particular project must address the same question about the same work. Participants do not combine unrelated assessments of different works within one project.

Related concepts: Reasoned insight

In this model, a departure from the social media profit logic in which platform operators turn people’s attention and interaction primarily into a source of revenue for themselves.

Collective decidement directs rewards to participants themselves for their intellectual effort and impartial assessment. A commercial dimension remains: tickets and book vouchers have economic value, and creating and distributing culture requires resources. What changes is the basis and recipient of the reward: participants receive a tangible benefit for recognising culture and contributing to shared understanding. Decommercialisation in this sense does not mean that culture or a participant’s contribution loses its economic value.

Related concepts: CI currency · Impartial assessment · Social reward

The ability to judge one's own limits of knowledge, uncertainty, and the probability that an answer or evaluation may be wrong.

Epistemic calibration is an additional rather than primary signal of competence. Tests may include options such as 'I don't know', 'None of the answers is correct', or 'All answers are correct', as well as questions built on false premises. The purpose is to distinguish genuine understanding from unwarranted confidence.

An asymmetry in a decision system in which the right to define the problem, select relevant knowledge, interpret facts, and legitimise the decision depends on institutional position.

An epistemic hierarchy can exist even where people are formally consulted or invited to speak. The crucial question is whose knowledge can actually change the structure of the decision. Post-hierarchy seeks to detach this privilege from office and distribute influence according to relevant competence, experience, and the process of collective decidement.

A situation in which one person, office, expert group, or institution effectively controls the formulation of the problem, the selection of admissible knowledge, and the legitimisation of the final decision.

An epistemic monopoly is an extreme form of epistemic hierarchy. It may survive even where public consultation exists if other participants' contributions have no real capacity to alter the structure of the decision. Post-hierarchical architecture seeks to break such monopolies not through simple majority voting but through diversity of competence, accountable anonymity, interaction, weighted evaluation, and feedback.

The sequence and structure of many idea evaluations made by the same participant, allowing a relatively stable mental model of evaluation to be identified.

A candidate's profile does not have to replicate the majority. It should show a reliable relationship with competent evaluation patterns, especially where brainstormers with high weight in relevant specializations exist. Individual deviations are not automatically errors; they may be sources of new insight.

Knowledge and evaluative capacity arising from direct experience of living with a problem, using a service, working inside a process, or experiencing the consequences of a decision.

A patient may know what a healthcare administrator cannot see; a student may know what a school leader cannot see; a city resident may know what an aggregate statistical indicator does not reveal. Experiential competence does not replace technical or professional competence, but complements it and may expose dimensions of a problem that would otherwise remain invisible.

In art assessment, the same brainstormer can be knowledgeable about the field and have personally seen the production, heard the concert or read the book. Functional and experiential competence complement one another within the same project: participants explain how specific artistic means produced the effect they experienced and assess the insights offered by others.

Related concepts: Reasoned insight · Impartial assessment

A person's problem-specific capacity to provide a reliable evaluation or valuable solution regardless of their general status or position.

Functional competence is always contextual: the same person may be highly important in one decidement process and peripheral in another. It may rest on professional knowledge, accumulated experience, specialization weight, or other reliable signals. The concept distinguishes 'who is an expert in general' from 'who is competent for this question'.

A scale from −5 to +5 used to evaluate an individual idea rather than an entire project, its author, or an application.

Positive scores indicate agreement and negative scores disagreement. Extreme −5 and +5 ratings are possible but should be reserved for exceptional cases. Zero is not the neutral midpoint of this scale: it is reserved for diagnostic rejection when an idea is unsuitable for ordinary collective ranking.

Assessment of a submitted idea according to its merits and relevance to the project’s question, without allowing its author’s status, personal relationships or group loyalty to determine the score.

Impartiality does not require participants to discard personal experience or share the same taste. A brainstormer may dislike a work yet acknowledge its craftsmanship, or identify a flaw in a favourite work. Participants do not make their sympathies the sole basis of assessment and apply the same standards of reasoning to peers and opponents alike. Accountable anonymity and reward rules give practical support to this commitment.

Related concepts: Accountable anonymity · Reasoned insight · Reverse prisoner’s dilemma · Universal principles of assessment

Interaction among different subjective perspectives in which shared understanding emerges not by eliminating individual viewpoints but by allowing them to complement, refine, and transform one another.

In a collective-intelligence environment, intersubjectivity is a source of synergy: one participant's anonymous idea may reveal a dimension others had not seen, while their responses can generate new solutions. Common ground arises through interaction rather than enforced uniformity.

An indicator summarising how well an applicant understands the subject matter of the application and the peripheral dimensions relevant to decidement.

The test may examine factual knowledge, degrees of correctness, false premises, technological feasibility, cost, risks, causal relationships, and other dimensions important to the application. A sufficient result allows progression to candidate status but does not in itself confer permanent expert status.

Collective decidement on questions where factual knowledge alone is insufficient because competing values, norms, duties, or moral principles must be reconciled.

Normative decidement does not replace values with majority voting. Its task is to expose competing assumptions, consequences, and principles; allow different competences and moral perspectives to interact; and seek a solution that best withstands collective evaluation. It is especially important in ethics, war, care, education, and other fields where facts alone do not determine what ought to be done.

An architecture of decidement in which a shared assessment emerges through the interaction of reasoned ideas, while their evaluation is detached from participants’ status and group loyalty.

In this model, participants remain anonymous to one another, do not know the cluster’s full membership and cannot see a pre-published aggregate score while assessing ideas. Together with rewards for impartial contributions, these conditions are designed to prevent interest groups from organising assessment for their own benefit. A publicly known creator of the work under examination does not in itself prevent this architecture from operating: the brainstormers who submit and assess ideas about the work remain anonymous.

People determine the value of the work and of the submitted ideas. Algorithms aggregate their assessments, take specialization weights into account and calculate points. Objectivizing decidement grounds the shared result in examined features of the work and in arguments, while preserving diversity of experience and taste.

Related concepts: Specialization weight · Accountable anonymity · Collective wisdom · Reasoned insight · Impartial assessment · Reverse prisoner’s dilemma

An evaluation structure in which a competent group divides into two or more clearly distinct positions.

Polarization is not automatically evidence of a weak project or failed communication. It may reveal a deep and unresolved fault line in the problem, different assumptions, or competing values. In such cases polarization itself becomes information and may justify a new decision project.

A decision and coordination architecture in which the right to define a problem, shape a decision, and influence it is not automatically and permanently concentrated in a single office, committee, or institution.

Post-hierarchy does not mean abolishing structure, leadership, or accountability. It separates formal responsibility for implementation from an epistemic monopoly over decision-making: temporary configurations of competence form around a specific problem, while influence arises from relevant competence, reliable contribution, and collective interaction. When the work is complete, the group disperses; results and a memory of contribution remain, but no permanent centre of authority should emerge.

A decision to transfer a problem that has emerged within one cluster to another group because it requires a substantially different configuration of specializations.

Participants or AI may propose a transfer. If the group agrees, work on that question closes in the current cluster and the problem may be transferred to another cluster or a new one may be created for it. In this way, a group does not pretend to be competent where its cognitive capacity is insufficient.

A collective indicator of how important a particular specialization was to the outcome of a specific decision project.

This weight is not a participant's self-assessment. It emerges from collective evaluation and connects the content of the project with participants' actual contribution. The more important a specialization is to a particular result, the more strongly it affects the updating of the relevant participants' specialization weights.

A self-contained, independently assessable idea about the question or work under examination, whose conclusion is supported by specific features, examples or an explained causal connection.

In an art assessment project, a brainstormer may explain why a particular pause in a production reveals a character’s fear and connect it with earlier scenes. Other participants assess both the accuracy of the idea and the grounds offered for it. An impression becomes a reasoned insight when its author shows what in the work supports that judgement. Each submission makes one clear evaluative point; claims that may warrant different assessments are submitted separately.

Related concepts: Decision project / brainstorm · Zero-score idea rejection · Impartial assessment

A situation in which an idea or solution is strongly recognised across several different specializations, experiences, or perspectives on the problem.

Resonance helps reveal ideas that connect previously separate dimensions of a problem. It is not the same as popularity or a majority vote: what matters especially is whether people with different competences independently evaluate the idea strongly.

The name used in this collective intelligence model for an incentive principle under which participants benefit personally by contributing impartially to a shared result.

Participants seek to earn as many points as possible, while the greatest reward is associated with assessments close to the collective wisdom emerging through honest interaction. It is therefore more beneficial to assess an anonymously submitted idea accurately than to support a weak idea because of its presumed author. The shared answer is not published in advance: in seeking to ‘hit’ collective wisdom, participants themselves help bring it into being. The pursuit of personal benefit thus supports a shared intellectual effort.

Related concepts: Accountable anonymity · Collective wisdom · Impartial assessment · Social reward

A principle under which each additional reliable contribution increases an already high specialization weight by progressively less.

Saturation protects the system from a new oligarchy: early participation does not become permanent privilege, strong newcomers can approach established participants, and a few veterans cannot gradually monopolise the collective result. Weight may also decline after prolonged inactivity or as a field itself changes.

Harry G. Frankfurt’s concept of a person’s desire that a particular first-order desire should determine their action.

An art evaluator may want to defend a favourite creator while also wanting the desire to be honest to govern their assessment. The second aspiration is reflective: the person considers which desire they want to have the power to determine action. Collective decidement’s reward rules support the aspiration to assess impartially, because acknowledging a well-founded insight also benefits the participant. This practical support connects a person’s capacity to assess their own motives with the social conditions of action.

Source: Harry G. Frankfurt, ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’ (1971).

Related concepts: Impartial assessment · Reverse prisoner’s dilemma · Social reward

A principle under which formal legal or administrative responsibility for an action does not grant one person or institution the exclusive right to formulate the decision itself.

A manager, physician, municipality, or other institution may remain responsible for implementation, legality, and safety, while the epistemic content of the decision is formed through a broader competent decidement process. Post-hierarchy therefore does not abolish accountability; it prevents accountability from automatically becoming an epistemic monopoly.

A candidate's real evaluation of an idea that the system records and analyses but does not yet include in the calculation of the collective result.

Shadow mode makes it possible to test a person's evaluation model in real decidement without granting an unvalidated participant direct influence over the shared outcome. Competence is therefore tested not only through a knowledge test but also through behaviour toward real ideas.

A reward for a participant’s contribution whose value becomes evident through collective interaction: a reasoned insight, an impartial assessment or help in understanding the question under examination.

In art assessment, points earned through valuable contributions can be exchanged for a theatre or concert ticket, or a book voucher. The reward is social because of the basis on which it is earned: a contribution to shared understanding. A ticket or voucher also has monetary value. Participants can thus gain a new cultural experience through their efforts to help others understand an earlier one, while the creator receives a reasoned assessment of the work.

Related concepts: CI currency · Reverse prisoner’s dilemma · Decommercialisation · Second-order volition

A cognitive and practical field of competence describing what kinds of knowledge, experience, or capability actually mattered in a particular decision project.

A specialization is not merely a diploma, job position, or professional title. It is usually not fixed conclusively before the project begins: AI may initially provide orientation, while participants can later propose more precise descriptions of the specializations involved and evaluate their importance. The system thus links competence to work actually performed rather than to permanent status.

An indicator of a participant's accumulated reliable contribution within a particular specialization, describing their functional competence in that field.

A person may hold many different specialization weights earned across different clusters. A new application uses only the relevant part of that history. Weight grows according to real contribution and the importance of the specialization in the project, but it must not turn into a permanent expert rank or title of authority.

Influence over a decision that arises primarily from office, title, rank, reputation, or institutional position rather than from contribution relevant to the particular problem.

Post-hierarchy does not mean that experienced or trusted people lose influence. It requires influence to be continually justified in the context of the problem. A teacher, manager, expert, or institutional leader may be an important participant, but their position should not automatically make their statement stronger than statements made by others.

Principles applied to people and groups regardless of their status, affiliation or the evaluator’s sympathies, including recognition of human dignity, freedom and life as values.

The collective decidement model rests on the premise that people free from group pressure can recognise these principles and apply them consistently. Participants apply the same standards to themselves and their peers as they do to other groups. In art assessment, this premise is compatible with creative freedom: the grotesque, fiction or a disturbing image is examined in the context of the work, the purpose of its artistic means and their effects. Participants assess what the work reveals and how it achieves this; the work need not become a declaration of moral approval.

Related concepts: Normative decidement · Impartial assessment · Objectivizing decidement

A diagnostic code indicating that a submitted idea is unsuitable for ordinary collective ranking and should not consume further collective attention.

A score of 0 may be used when an idea duplicates another, combines several separately evaluable claims in one submission, is banal, falls outside the project's topic, is unintelligible, or reveals the identity of the brainstormer who submitted it. −5 still means very strong disagreement with a meaningful and evaluable idea; 0 belongs to a different diagnostic category.

In an art assessment project, this anonymity requirement applies to the participant submitting the idea. The creator of the work under analysis may be known; mentioning that creator’s name is not in itself grounds for a zero-score rejection.

Related concepts: Accountable anonymity · Reasoned insight