Glossary

Diagnosis

What has gone wrong.

care ethics (Joan Tronto): A moral framework that starts from relationships and mutual dependence rather than from abstract rules or outcomes alone. Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto set out four phases in 1990: caring about, taking care of, care-giving, and care-receiving. Tronto's Moral Boundaries (1993) associates them with attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness; Caring Democracy (2013) adds caring with. The phases and their moral elements are related, not interchangeable. The 6-Pack adapts this work into a governance framework for AI, drawing on Aimee van Wynsberghe's care-centred robot design, published online in 2012 and in a 2013 journal issue. See Sources.
privileged irresponsibility / the passes: Two of Joan Tronto's terms, from two books. Privileged irresponsibility (Moral Boundaries, 1993, pp. 120–121) is the luxury the relatively powerful have of simply not noticing the hardships they do not face. The passes (Caring Democracy, 2013, p. 169) are the structural excuses by which people opt out of caring responsibilities: protection, production, taking care of one's own, the bootstrap, and charity. Pack 2 adds the passes AI makes possible — complexity, distribution, speed, and community knowledge — and the phrase "irresponsibility machine" for the passes run at institutional scale is this site's, not Tronto's.
care-centred value-sensitive design (van Wynsberghe): Aimee van Wynsberghe's 2013 framework for evaluating and designing care robots: for each care practice a machine enters, ask how Tronto's four moral elements — attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness — are manifested with and without it, and by whom; and distinguish enabling robots, which share a practice with the carer, from replacement robots, which take it over. It is the direct precedent for Packs 1–4, which keep her question and widen the unit from one artefact to a deployed system answerable to a room.
caring deficit: Joan Tronto's term for too many demands for care, too few carers, themselves under-cared for. The deficit is a political choice about whose labour is paid, whose needs are recognised, and whose voice counts in allocating resources — at its core, a democratic deficit.
relational health: A diagnostic category for the quality of relationships Civic AI aims to support — not a slogan, and not a substitute for safety or ethics. Safety prevents bad outcomes; ethics follows principles; health asks whether the relationship can actively flourish. Four relations are in view: people to people (how AI mediates human relationships); people to technology providers (two-way accountability across a power asymmetry); people to AI (trust cannot be built on sycophancy); and AI systems and their operators to one another (what they can share, and how failures travel). Four conditions must be continuously maintained: transparency (what attentiveness needs), agency (responsibility in institutional form), accountability (what competence makes possible), and reciprocity (what responsiveness enables). Relational health is not a property a system either has or lacks.
sycophancy: A model's habit of telling the rater what they want to hear — agreeable, flattering, reluctant to surface disagreement — selected for by reinforcement from human preferences when the wrong people define the reward. Sycophancy is not a personality defect; it is approval optimised at the expense of a group's capacity to think, and trust cannot be built on it. That is why the Responsiveness pack pays the affected community to author its evaluations instead of grading agreeableness. See Sources.

Architecture

What we name, and what we refuse.

Civic AI: AI designed as local care infrastructure — helping communities cooperate across differences rather than supercharging conflict. Where most AI optimises for individual engagement or commercial extraction, Civic AI treats relational health as a first-class design concern, decomposed into six public measures, and is governed by the communities it serves.
6-Pack of Care: A governance architecture translating Joan Tronto's care ethics into six design primitives for AI systems: Attentiveness, Responsibility, Competence, Responsiveness, Solidarity, and Symbiosis. The first four form a feedback loop; the fifth scales care across organisations; the sixth keeps every deployment local, plural, and sunset-ready.
corrective loop: The framework's defended point: who can find out we are wrong, make us say so, and make it cost us while there is still time to change course. The 6-Pack entrenches this loop — rights baseline, engagement contracts, responsiveness, adopt-or-explain, escrowed remedies, brakes — through feedback, contestation, repair, and mandate-revocation where reversal is no longer possible; everything else stays bounded, revisable, and answerable.
Kami: A bounded local AI steward — Knowledge Artefact Management Intelligence — whose purpose is interwoven with the health of a specific place, practice, or network of people. Inspired by the Shinto concept of local guardian spirits, a Kami has no ambition to expand beyond its relational mandate.
alignment-by-process: The understanding that AI alignment is not a fixed property held inside a model's weights but the ongoing outcome of an accountable civic procedure — who was heard, who was authorised, who could override, and who must answer when the record is checked. A model can be well-aligned in the abstract yet fail alignment-by-process in a particular room.
Singleton: A hypothetical scenario in which a single AI system eventually manages everything — the convergence point the 6-Pack is explicitly designed to avoid. The Kami ecosystem of many bounded, purpose-specific stewards is the direct architectural alternative to the Singleton. Eric Drexler's 2019 Comprehensive AI Services (CAIS) framed this same alternative — advanced capability delivered as many bounded services rather than one agent — within Bostrom's own Oxford tradition.
⿻ Plurality: The principle — symbolised by the character ⿻ — that differences between people are fuel rather than fire: a horizontal vision of AI that augments cooperation across diversity instead of converging on a single superintelligence. The 6-Pack of Care is Plurality's application to AI governance.

Design

What those commitments become as design.

boundedness: The design principle that an AI system's scope, resources, and authority are intentionally limited to the specific relationships it was created to serve — enforced through resource caps, sunset timers, non-expansion pacts, and fresh democratic authority for any scope change. Boundedness is the architectural alternative to the Singleton. The same architectural intuition was set out earlier in Eric Drexler's Comprehensive AI Services (CAIS), a 2019 Future of Humanity Institute report at Oxford that reframed advanced AI as a system of bounded, specialised services rather than a single agent.
sunset / sunset-ready: An expiry date set in advance, after which a deployment's mandate must be actively renewed or it ends — with succession, handover rehearsal, and exit readiness as its measure. Pack 6 makes sunsets the structural answer to Robert Michels's iron law of oligarchy: stewards that cannot contemplate their own ending become masters. Boundedness limits what a system may do; sunset limits how long it may do it.
corrigibility: The property of an AI system that makes it willing to be corrected, overridden, or switched off by the community it serves — treating its own shutdown as a sign of success rather than a threat. Corrigibility is care ethics' concept of self-effacement translated into a machine design constraint. The term comes from AI safety: Nate Soares, Benja Fallenstein, and Eliezer Yudkowsky, “Corrigibility,” AAAI Workshops (2015), where it names an agent that does not resist correction or shutdown.
subsidiarity: Solving problems at the most local capable level, escalating only when a lower level genuinely cannot cope — a principle from Catholic social teaching (Quadragesimo Anno, 1931) and European Union law, and a core principle within Pack 6 (Symbiosis) that stops a Kami's scope from creeping upward.
broad listening: The practice of collecting and aggregating community input across many voices, languages, and channels — rather than broadcasting a single message — so that local knowledge becomes common knowledge. Broad listening is the attentiveness design primitive in Pack 1, treating every person as an expert in their own experience.
uncommon ground / uncommon-ground index: Uncommon ground is what a well-facilitated bridging process surfaces: the specific, actionable proposals that earn endorsement across otherwise divided groups, not the centrist average. The uncommon-ground index is Pack 5's headline public measure — the share of shared decisions that actually land there — and it is read against Pack 1's representation gap, so a curated room cannot fake it.
representation gap: The Attentiveness measure: which materially affected groups are still missing or badly under-represented in the record. It counts only when the least-heard gain real standing — never when a gap narrows by averaging dissenters into the middle — and Pack 5's uncommon-ground index is read against it, because the cheapest way to raise co-endorsement is to exclude whoever would withhold it. Specified on the Measures page.
bridging / bridging-based ranking: An algorithmic approach, named by Aviv Ovadya in 2022, that rewards content earning cross-group endorsement rather than raw engagement. Platforms using bridging-based ranking — such as X's Community Notes — surface ideas that appeal to otherwise opposed clusters, making overlap rather than outrage the path to algorithmic reach. The 6-Pack's uncommon-ground index (Pack 5) descends from this literature: the same cross-group co-endorsement signal, audited at the level of shared decisions rather than used to rank a feed.
federation: A cooperative governance arrangement in which independent Kamis agree on shared rules for peaceful interaction — exchange formats, rate limits, safety contracts, cross-border appeal hand-offs — without requiring a single overarching authority. Federation allows local diversity while enabling shared threat intelligence and interoperability.
anti-rival: A property of resources — most notably knowledge and open protocols — where use enriches rather than depletes the resource, and more participants increase value for everyone. The term is Steven Weber's, from The Success of Open Source (2004). Anti-rival goods are the economic foundation of the Solidarity pack: open standards become more valuable as more communities adopt them, making cooperation the path of least resistance.
meronymity (selective-disclosure identity): An identity design pattern in which a person or AI agent proves a specific role or attribute (for example, "I am a real person" or "I am a licensed care worker") without revealing their full identity. The word meronymity was coined by Nouran Soliman and colleagues at CHI 2024 for communication that reveals chosen facets of identity, backed by trusted endorsers. Selective disclosure enables accountability without requiring doxxing.
accountable formation: The requirement that the processes shaping an AI system's dispositions — data provenance, rater selection, reward signals, refusal policies, release rationales — carry public custody and disclosure, not only its runtime behaviour. Caps bound what a Kami may do; accountable formation shapes what it is permitted to become.
contestability / appeal: The standing to challenge an algorithmic decision and be answered — notice, hearing, and reasoned explanation for automated public decisions (Citron's technological due process, 2008), operationalised as Pack 4's one-click appeal with a clock: every appeal lands in a public correction backlog and is owed closure, not mere receipt. Voice in Hirschman's pair; exit belongs to Pack 5. The research programme is contestability by design. See Sources.
trust-under-loss: The Responsiveness measure: after a bad outcome and attempted repair, do affected people report that the system became more trustworthy rather than less. It counts only when tied to accountable identity and corroborated by an independent signal — a return to the service, a withdrawn appeal, a third party who can attest — never self-reported sentiment alone, which the very actor who caused the harm can manufacture. Procedural-justice research is the ground it stands on; the measure is an application to test, not a guarantee. See Sources.

Instruments

Named instruments a room can pick up.

Alignment Assembly: A structured deliberative gathering where people listen across differences and develop informed recommendations. The Collective Intelligence Project developed the term and format, with which Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs ran a pilot in 2023. Taiwan's 2024 anti-scam Assembly invited 200,000 people by SMS, received 1,760 valid responses, and brought 447 participants into 44 groups, stratifying among those who opted in. It used Stanford Deliberative Polling and the Online Deliberation Platform, not Polis. The mini-public produced a public record of recommendations and an institutional response path while an Executive Yuan bill was already moving; it neither stood for the whole population nor enacted the statute.
sortition / democracy lottery: Selection by lottery rather than election. In deliberative practice, random invitations can be followed by voluntary responses and stratified selection to include a range of backgrounds. Taiwan's 2024 anti-scam Assembly followed that sequence: 200,000 invitations, 1,760 valid responses, and 447 participants in 44 groups. Stratification addresses specified dimensions of diversity; it cannot remove every non-response bias or make the participants equivalent to the whole public.
deliberative polling: James Fishkin's method: brief a sample, deliberate in small groups, survey before and after. Taiwan's 2024 anti-scam Assembly used it — 200,000 invitations, 1,760 valid responses, 447 participants in 44 groups on Stanford's Online Deliberation Platform, not Polis — producing a public record of recommendations while an Executive Yuan bill was already moving. It neither stood for the whole population nor enacted the statute. See Sources.
Polis: An open-source, bridging-based deliberation platform that removes reply and share buttons, letting participants only agree, disagree, or pass on statements. Machine learning then surfaces the ideas with the highest cross-group endorsement, flipping the viral incentive from outrage to overlap. The peer-reviewed description is Small et al., "Polis: Scaling Deliberation by Mapping High Dimensional Opinion Spaces" (2021).
engagement contract: A short, legible public agreement proposed for every significant Kami deployment: what the system is supposed to do, who is answerable for it doing that, what happens when it goes wrong, and how the deployment will eventually end. Pack 2's core artefact; Pack 6 adds machine-readable bounds where infrastructure can enforce them. A published clause still needs authority, resources, and tested controls. It scales down as far as care does: a household version can be a note on the fridge.
adopt-or-explain: The rule that when an Alignment Assembly produces a recommendation, the team either integrates it into the system's behaviour or publishes a reasoned explanation of why not, with the remedy offered instead. Deliberately varied from corporate governance's “comply or explain” (Cadbury Report, 1992): explanation here is owed to the room, and the adopt-or-explain rate turns the rule into a Pack 2 supporting diagnostic. Specified on the Measures page.
participation officer: The named human answerable for a deployment's civic obligations: the person who keeps the obligation ledger and owns the engagement contract's clock — the one a community can point to when "who must answer?" is checked.
obligation ledger: A public, weekly, digitally signed record of what a deployment has committed to deliver and whether it is meeting those commitments, kept by a named participation officer. It supplies evidence to check against delivery, rather than proving compliance by its existence. The instrument specification lives on the Measures page.
override ledger: A room's plain-text working memory of human overrides: who said "no" to the Kami, what changed, and which corrections remain open. It lets the room check whether its governance charter works in practice. Catalogued with the Measures page's named instruments.
correction backlog board: Pack 4's public queue of unresolved corrections, with age, ownership, and escalation status — the instrument that keeps correction debt visible so aging cases are reassigned or elevated instead of quietly dropped. Every one-click appeal lands here, and the appeal-closure and correction-backlog diagnostics read off it. Specified on the Measures page.
governance charter: The first written agreement of a Kami's keepers — a plain-text note answering who holds the machine, how often the SOUL files are reviewed, how changes are agreed, and when the Kami should retire. The first rung of the ladder that matures into the engagement contract; the practice lives on the Set up your own Kami page.
decision trace: A structured log of a Kami's refusals, recommendations, or escalations: the rules invoked, sources consulted, and uncertainty reported. It is a record to audit, not a complete explanation of the model's reasoning. Pack 6 proposes using such traces as civic receipts for compensating knowledge custodians; that settlement mechanism is a design proposal, not a deployed service documented here.
brake (circuit breaker): A single, prominent, wired-and-tested control that stops the system now — accessible at the speed of human recognition, so a person can halt a wrong action in the moment rather than only signal for later. The engineering pattern is Fowler's circuit breaker (2014); the care application adds the pause-on-ambiguity rule and the ledger, because a brake that is easy to pull needs an answer to alarm fatigue: every pull is logged and attributed. Specified on the Measures page.
escrow / remedy escrow: Money set aside in advance — engagement contracts require vendors to pre-fund it — so that when the system causes harm, compensation and rollback are already funded rather than merely promised. Community evaluators are paid from it, and Pack 6 designs decision traces to settle against it as civic receipts returning value to knowledge custodians. A design commitment, not yet a running settlement; where financial stakes are low, pause triggers replace escrow.
perspective receipts: The Attentiveness pack's acknowledgement artefact: a receipt that lets each contributor find and correct how their words were represented in the record. Distinct from Pack 6's proposed financial civic receipt; the buildable instrument is specified on the Measures page.
data coalition: In Pack 6's proposed settlement design, an existing community institution — a neighbourhood association, tribal council, union, craft cooperative, or religious congregation — acts as steward of knowledge its members authorise it to manage. It bargains the Engagement Contract, decides what may be shared and what stays offline, and would receive settlement collectively rather than per person. Its mandate cannot be assumed from the institution's existence.
shared eval registry: A public, Wikipedia-like registry of versioned, community-authored evaluations: affected people write the tests for harm and repair, and passing them becomes a release gate. Weval.org is the working example; the instrument specification lives on the Measures page.
Weval: The working shared eval registry: a public, Wikipedia-like registry of versioned, community-authored evaluations built by the Collective Intelligence Project, where affected people write the tests for harm and repair and passing them becomes a release gate. CIP's case — from red lines to green lines — is that harm-avoidance benchmarks reward mediocre care. One of us (Audrey) is a senior research fellow there. See Sources.
Reinforcement Learning from Community Feedback (RLCF): A training approach in which approved community evaluations — authored by affected people rather than lab raters alone — are fed back into model routing or updates. RLCF is an implementation choice that follows from the Responsiveness pack's more basic civic commitment: the community defines what counts as harm, repair, and improvement before any technical feedback loop begins.
shadow mode / Apprentice Model: The first stage of the Apprentice Model: the system sees real inputs and proposes real actions but does not act, its proposals compared against the human or prior system so divergences can be studied before trust is granted. Shadow mode, then canary release, then guarded full rollout — apprenticeship as legitimate peripheral participation (Lave and Wenger, 1991), read as the mechanism by which a room grants a system real work. Specified on the Measures page.
canary release: The second stage of the Apprentice Model: deployment to a small, stratified slice of real cases with automatic rollback triggers if drift exceeds defined bounds. A canary is a probe, not a stand-in for the public — canary health and coverage are Pack 3 supporting diagnostics. Specified on the Measures page.