Michael Uschold was in the Fort for the last couple of days, and it sparked some interesting discussion on organizations in gist. In short we think we can now distinguish the broad range of types of organizations we want to cover (we want to include some non traditional “organizations” such as juries, and organizations that are spontaneously created via contract) with six properties that manifest differently for each type of organization:
- ownable — some organizations (Corporations for instance) can be owned, others (marriages, juries etc) cannot
- capacity to act (including contract) — is the organization recognized in a way that they can enter into contract, or other can they act (perform) autonomously
- purpose — the purpose of an organization (profit, charity, common defense) is the main distinguisher of many major types of organizations
- haveMembers — some organizations are defined by their members, some have limitations on number of members (Sole Proprietorships can only have individuals members)
- createdVia — what gave rise to, and/or legitimized the organization (a government, a contract etc)
- partOf — does this organization have independent existence or is it partOf another Organization (a department)
I wanted to jot this down because it’s likely a couple of weeks before I have any time to get back into gist and make these changes, but we thought this had some pretty interesting insights.
