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Glossary

General terms

  • Public interest technology: “Public Interest Technology refers to the study and application of technology expertise to advance the public interest in a way that generates public benefits and promotes the public good, particularly for those members of our society least well served historically and today by existing systems and policies.” — PIT Lab, Stanford

Organizational structure

  • Steering: defines and protects EAR’s commitments
  • Services: the resource generation and distribution layer to enable autonomous work.
  • Programs: EAR-supported initiatives that engage in action research and to foster cooperative research and imagination.

Artifacts

  • Resource: Resources provide important or load bearing context about EAR standard operating procedures. Resources make processes, structures, or rituals legible and accessible to EAR members.
  • Agreement: Agreements are policy documents that shape how we work together at EAR. The process for how we ratify and evolve agreements will be defined in a decisions agreement.
  • Guide: Guides explain how EAR members get stuff done. Guides are independent from agreements, in that they provide examples and standard operating procedure examples that make it easy to pick up and apply policy defined in agreements to everyday scenarios.
  • Proposal: Proposals are conversation starters that diagnose a problem, describe an opportunity area, and propose both guiding policy and an action plan to make it happen. The purpose of a proposal is to solicit feedback and collaboration to introduce a new policy, spark a change, or evolve how we work.