About · Governance
Governance
The Global Wellbeing Commons is intended to become a trusted shared resource. Its governance must therefore extend beyond technical database management.
The governance framework is being designed to address:
- Editorial standards
- Evidence assessment
- Cultural representation
- Community participation
- Attribution and provenance
- Conflicts of interest
- Corrections and disputes
- Sensitive and restricted knowledge
- Data licensing
- Responsible reuse
- Institutional accountability
Distributed expertise
The Commons therefore uses a distributed review model. Different contributors may assess different aspects of an entry, including:
- Historical accuracy
- Cultural context
- Practice description
- Clinical research
- Safety
- Terminology
- Lineage
- Data structure
Commitments
Areas where the framework takes a defined position — how uncertainty is represented, how communities participate, how independence is protected, and how consent and cultural protocols are recorded.
Transparent uncertainty
Where sources conflict or evidence is limited, the Commons should represent the disagreement or uncertainty rather than forcing an artificial conclusion.
Community participation
For knowledge connected to identifiable living communities, appropriate representatives should have meaningful opportunities to review, correct, contextualise, or place conditions on its representation.
Independence
Governance mechanisms will be developed to reduce undue influence from commercial, ideological, institutional, or practitioner interests.
Social license
The Commons is intended to hold knowledge that communities have agreed to share. Social license is the ongoing acceptance of that representation by the community concerned — it can carry conditions, and it can change over time.
This covers how consent is recorded, how it is renewed, and what happens when a community asks for a description to be changed or withdrawn.
Traditional knowledge labels
Traditional Knowledge Labels are community-controlled labels that travel with a record and state the cultural protocols attached to it — attribution, permission, and conditions on reuse.
A practice may be openly licensed and still carry conditions on commercial use, on reuse outside its community, or on how it is described. The Commons is designed to hold both.