Acceptance Criteria for a New System

A test sheet written before the thing is chosen: what any proposed system must be able to do to be worth a people's participation — including, and especially, this one.

Acceptance criteria are an old delivery discipline moved to a new scale. You state what a thing must satisfy before the work begins, so that acceptance is a reading rather than an argument afterwards. Applied to a whole arrangement for living, it turns should we join this? from a question of appeal into a question of capability (Conditions of Acceptance, Conditions of satisfaction, The forging criterion).

The criteria themselves run to several dozen and cluster into a few demands. That a system must see the whole and how its parts affect one another, across every scale from a person to the planet (Levels Of Scale, System of Systems, Omniconsideration). That it must serve the long term and the regenerative rather than the immediate (Regeneration, Covenant Across Time, Generational Time). That it must be inclusive and just, giving everyone a voice and a path toward their own potential (Equal Opportunity For All, Justice, Representation). That it must be adaptive under uncertainty, and able to scale both directions (Anti-Fragility, One tool, every scale). That it must empower rather than administer, be transparent and correctable, and keep learning (Agency, not ownership, Transparency, Continuous Improvement). That it must be citizen-led and independent of any special interest (We The People, Legitimacy, Ideological Capture). That it must produce measurable throughput of the aim and show it live to the people it concerns (Throughput, The Dashboard of Civilization, Measure everything, manage to the milestones). And that it must protect the sovereignty of each part while still letting the whole move (Sovereignty At Every Scale, Subsidiarity, Higher Order Functional Unity).

The move that makes the list honest is the first sentence of it: each person has a duty to derive their own and to judge by those. A test sheet handed down is another authority; a test sheet one writes oneself is an instrument (The Discernment Permission, Author's Voice Is Sovereign, Sovereignty Of Consciousness).

Two things a reader should know. Several of the criteria are dated to a particular year and window and name capital flows in the trillions; those are the source's 2023 framing and are estimates, not measurements, and are not carried here. And one criterion concerns force; what this library carries is the guardianship material and nothing operational (The Sacred Use Of Force, The Four Conditions For Destructive Force, Non-Violence).

A second and different list of acceptance criteria exists elsewhere in the corpus, cross-referenced from this one and not reconciled with it.

Also called: the test sheet · what any system must be able to do Stands on: Conditions of Acceptance · Conditions of satisfaction · Discernment Opens onto: The Non-Attachment Clause · The Test of Belonging · The Discernment Permission · Throughput · Sovereignty At Every Scale · The Dashboard of Civilization · LIØNSBERG Is A Prototype, Not The Eternal Essence · The forging criterion In play: the door — run by a Cell against anything it is considering joining, this one included Sources: LIØNSBERG Wiki Books/Beyond The Meta Crisis/6.5 Acceptance criteria for the New System and Approach.md (unmarked, 2023) Open: Several criteria are dated to 2023 and to a seven-year window, and the list has not been revised since. · Two different acceptance-criteria lists exist in the corpus and are cross-referenced without being reconciled. · No criterion is falsifiable as written — none says how it would be judged met.