{"schema_version":1,"research_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp04_external_evaluation_20260802","source_assessment_id":"invariant_mode_decomposition_design__political_science:PROPOSAL_FIRST:v0","cell_id":"invariant_mode_decomposition_design__political_science","search_queries":["site:gfoa.org budget adoption deadline best practice city council budget process collaboration","city failed to adopt budget by deadline consequences official council","municipal budget bargaining negotiations deadlock council research","dynamic bargaining eigenvalue political negotiation PCA disagreement modes","negotiation support system multi issue bargaining dashboard offers research","political negotiations process analysis turning points multi issue offers data research","dynamic mode decomposition social science political data bargaining","vector autoregression small sample minimum observations overfitting official documentation","site:seattle.gov city council budget amendments archive proposed budget official","site:council.nyc.gov budget data open data adopted modified financial plan official","site:gfoa.org negotiation facilitation budget best practice stakeholder budget process","site:icma.org city budget collaboration council staff conflict budget process","site:seattle.gov city charter council budget adoption authority budget committee agenda rules","site:seattle.gov council rules agenda committee chair authority budget amendments 2026","site:opengov.com government budgeting collaboration scenario planning product official","site:questica.com budget collaboration local government scenario planning official","site:bls.gov/ooh data scientists median pay 2025","site:bls.gov/ooh political scientists median pay 2025"],"sources":[{"source_id":"S1","title":"Coalition governance and municipal stability in South Africa: Institutional challenges and reform imperatives","publisher":"Dullah Omar Institute, University of the Western Cape — Local Government Bulletin","url":"https://dullahomarinstitute.org.za/multilevel-govt/local-government-bulletin/archives/volume-21-issue-3-june-2026/coalition-governance-and-municipal-stability-in-south-africa-institutional-challenges-and-reform-imperatives","source_class":"PRIMARY_RESEARCH","publication_date":"2026-06","accessed_at":"2026-08-02","claims_supported":["Semi-structured interviews with 52 municipal political, administrative, and expert respondents found frequent disruption of decisions, approvals, implementation, and compliance deadlines.","Up to 48% of senior managers reported frequent or consistent delays, and budget negotiations were described as politicized bargaining arenas that weakened fiscal discipline and delayed service delivery.","The authors expressly recommend negotiation and political-governance capacity building, continued research, learning, and benchmarking."]},{"source_id":"S2","title":"The Budget Process","publisher":"New York City Council","url":"https://council.nyc.gov/budget/process/","source_class":"GOVERNMENT_OR_REGULATOR","publication_date":"n.d.","accessed_at":"2026-08-02","claims_supported":["The Mayor prepares the expense and capital budgets, while the Council reviews and adopts them.","The process includes two rounds of analysis and public hearings, a formal Council response, and Mayor-Council negotiation over adjustments.","The adopted-budget agreement ordinarily must be reached before July 1, identifying the Council and Mayor as authorizers and establishing a consequential deadline."]},{"source_id":"S3","title":"Budget Extender, Local Law 102 of 2026 (Int. 0873-2026)","publisher":"New York City Council Legistar","url":"https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?GUID=2C5B37D7-9BEB-4FA4-8FAE-995A0EFBF54A&ID=7997279&Options=&Search=","source_class":"GOVERNMENT_OR_REGULATOR","publication_date":"2026-05-30","accessed_at":"2026-08-02","claims_supported":["The Council enacted a 2026 law extending multiple fiscal-year-2027 budget deadlines.","The law provides continuity rules if the expense or capital budget is not adopted by June 16, demonstrating that delayed adoption is sufficiently consequential to require formal contingency legislation.","The law preserves formal roles for the Mayor, Council, borough presidents, Independent Budget Office, hearings, and revenue estimates."]},{"source_id":"S4","title":"Seattle City Council budget amendment tracker","publisher":"Seattle City Council","url":"https://council.seattle.gov/2024/11/12/seattle-city-council-budget-amendment-tracker/","source_class":"OFFICIAL_ORGANIZATION_DATA","publication_date":"2024-11-12","accessed_at":"2026-08-02","claims_supported":["A city council already operates a searchable dashboard covering every submitted amendment to the mayor's proposed budget.","The tracker represents amendments as structured records with identifiers, departments, descriptions, sponsors, voting groups, and final votes.","The tracker was expressly released to help people follow the budget process and upcoming votes, evidencing demand for process legibility, while remaining an issue/amendment tracker rather than a modal dynamics tool."]},{"source_id":"S5","title":"NegoManage: A System for Supporting Bilateral Negotiations","publisher":"Springer Nature — Group Decision and Negotiation","url":"https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10726-013-9362-6","source_class":"PRIMARY_RESEARCH","publication_date":"2013-06-18","accessed_at":"2026-08-02","claims_supported":["Negotiation-support systems already structure multi-issue problems, score full-package offers, track offer and message exchanges, elicit preferences, and optimize agreements.","NegoManage represents each offer as a vector across all negotiation issues and compares sequences of offers or concession paths.","Its reliance on bilateral preference elicitation and actor-specific scoring differs from the candidate's aggregate, non-motive, transition-mode warning claim."]},{"source_id":"S6","title":"Analyzing the Multiple Dimensions of Negotiation Processes","publisher":"Springer Nature — Group Decision and Negotiation","url":"https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10726-016-9477-7","source_class":"PRIMARY_RESEARCH","publication_date":"2016-03-19","accessed_at":"2026-08-02","claims_supported":["Negotiation-process research already models substantive, communication, and emotional streams jointly over time.","The paper uses standardized interpolated path analysis to place offers and messages on a common time scale and treats each as an observation of a continuous process.","It establishes adjacent multidimensional process analysis but does not report eigendecomposition of city-budget proposal-gap transitions or procedural mode targeting."]},{"source_id":"S7","title":"On Dynamic Mode Decomposition: Theory and Applications","publisher":"Journal of Computational Dynamics / arXiv","url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0041","source_class":"PRIMARY_RESEARCH","publication_date":"2013-11-29","accessed_at":"2026-08-02","claims_supported":["Dynamic mode decomposition is established as eigendecomposition of an approximating linear operator derived from paired observations.","The method produces modes and eigenvalues and is connected to system identification and linear inverse modeling.","The paper identifies rank deficiency, linear-consistency assumptions, noise, and limited measurements as material failure modes, directly relevant to sparse bargaining-round data."]},{"source_id":"S8","title":"Math Occupations — Occupational Outlook Handbook","publisher":"U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics","url":"https://www.bls.gov/ooh/math/home.htm","source_class":"GOVERNMENT_OR_REGULATOR","publication_date":"2025-08-28","accessed_at":"2026-08-02","claims_supported":["The May 2024 median annual wage was $112,590 for data scientists, $104,350 for mathematicians and statisticians, and $91,290 for operations-research analysts.","These wage benchmarks provide a public labor-cost anchor for resource-equivalent estimates; they are not vendor quotes or municipal procurement prices."]}],"problem_evidence":{"support":"MODERATE","rationale":"Municipal budget bargaining visibly produces delay, disrupted approvals, missed deadlines, and delayed service delivery, while New York City's formal deadline and 2026 contingency law show that adoption timing matters. However, no source directly establishes the candidate's narrower diagnosis that a hidden, resampling-stable coupled disagreement mode causes or predicts city-budget deadlock better than observable disputes, veto points, shocks, and deadline indicators.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S3"]},"stakeholder_evidence":{"support":"MODERATE","rationale":"The NYC Mayor and Council are identifiable budget negotiators and authorizers, and Seattle's Council has already deployed a structured amendment tracker expressly to improve process legibility. S1 expressly calls for municipal negotiation capacity building and research. This supports workflow need and plausible institutional ownership, but no city, facilitator, clerk, funder, or council has requested spectral decomposition, predictive mode warnings, or procedural sensitivity recommendations.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S4"]},"prior_art":{"proximity":"ADJACENT_PRIOR_ART","closest_analogues":[{"name":"Seattle City Council budget amendment tracker","similarity":"An official city-budget dashboard structures amendments, sponsors, package groupings, and votes for process monitoring.","remaining_difference":"It tracks observable amendments and voting groups rather than estimating a round-to-round operator, modal gains, residuals, or intervention sensitivity.","source_ids":["S4"]},{"name":"NegoManage negotiation-support system","similarity":"Represents multi-issue offers as vectors, compares offer sequences, supports negotiation decisions, and analyzes whole packages.","remaining_difference":"It is bilateral and preference/utility based; the candidate instead proposes aggregate caucus gaps, non-causal transition modes, and nonbinding procedural advice without actor utility or motive scoring.","source_ids":["S5"]},{"name":"ICE/SIPA multidimensional negotiation-process analysis","similarity":"Treats negotiation events as multivariate processes evolving on a common time scale and supports statistical analysis of their relationships.","remaining_difference":"It integrates issue, communication, and emotion streams but does not identify invariant disagreement directions or validate city-budget procedural levers against a simple issue-gap baseline.","source_ids":["S6"]},{"name":"Dynamic mode decomposition","similarity":"Provides the exact operator-fitting, eigendecomposition, modal-gain, and rank-diagnostic machinery underlying the proposed dashboard.","remaining_difference":"It is a general dynamical-systems method; no searched source demonstrates a governed deployment on city-budget bargaining or evidence that political proposal sequences satisfy its local linearity and sampling assumptions.","source_ids":["S7"]}],"distinctive_claim_remaining":"Within one predeclared and institutionally stable city-budget process, a regularized linear operator fitted only to authorized aggregate proposal-gap snapshots will yield at least one resampling-stable coupled mode that improves held-out next-state or deadline-risk prediction over separate issue gaps plus deadline indicators, leaves no structured high-consequence residual, and maps selectively to a reversible authorized procedural lever. This is falsifiable but unvalidated.","confidence":"MODERATE"},"implementation_evidence":{"support":"WEAK","rationale":"The computation is conventional and lightweight, official budget workflows already generate structured amendments and sequential deliberations, and the proposed retrospective restriction fits existing institutional authority. The principal barrier is data, not software: amendments are not necessarily complete comparable caucus-level state snapshots; a single process may contain too few independent transitions for an eight-dimensional operator; rules, coalitions, fiscal shocks, agenda control, and strategic adaptation violate stationarity; and DMD is fragile under rank deficiency and noise. Public-record, deliberative-privilege, retention, accessibility, procurement, and facilitator-authority requirements must be verified locally. The nonbinding, aggregate, retrospective design mitigates but does not eliminate blame, agenda-power, privacy, or false-authority risks.","source_ids":["S2","S4","S6","S7"]},"scores":{"meaningful_impact":{"score":3,"rationale":"Timely budget adoption affects fiscal discipline, compliance, and service delivery, but the candidate's realized effect is unmeasured.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S3"]},"stakeholder_pull":{"score":2,"rationale":"Councils express need for legible, timely budget processes and negotiation capacity, but there is no expressed demand for modal analytics.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S4"]},"incremental_advantage":{"score":2,"rationale":"Coupled modes could add warning information beyond an amendment tracker, but no effect size, stable mode, or baseline improvement has been demonstrated.","source_ids":["S4","S5","S6","S7"]},"distinctiveness_plausibility":{"score":3,"rationale":"The searched literature contains all major ingredients but no exact governed city-budget application; bounded search cannot establish world novelty.","source_ids":["S4","S5","S6","S7"]},"technical_implementability":{"score":2,"rationale":"Implementation is mathematically routine, yet sparse, rank-deficient, nonstationary political sequences could make the output uninterpretable despite successful computation.","source_ids":["S6","S7"]},"adoption_authority_feasibility":{"score":3,"rationale":"Mayor-council budget authority and official tracking workflows are identifiable; live procedural recommendations still require jurisdiction-specific delegation, records review, and facilitator legitimacy.","source_ids":["S2","S3","S4"]},"evidence_readiness":{"score":2,"rationale":"Official amendments and votes exist, but the required consecutive full-state snapshots, caucus gaps, intervention labels, and sufficient independent transitions are not shown to exist.","source_ids":["S4","S6","S7"]},"safety_net_benefit":{"score":2,"rationale":"Nonbinding advice, aggregate data, retrospective validation, residual checks, and rollback reduce risk, but misleading mode labels could still distort bargaining power or assign implicit blame.","source_ids":["S2","S4","S7"]},"scalability":{"score":2,"rationale":"The software could be reused, but modes, coordinates, rules, authority, and validity windows must be rebuilt for each jurisdiction and budget regime.","source_ids":["S2","S4","S7"]}},"score_confidence":"MODERATE","costs":{"first_evidence":{"band_2026_usd":"10K_TO_50K","scope":"Six-to-ten week archival feasibility and retrospective modeling sprint: records inventory, coding protocol, baseline construction, regularized operator fits, resampling diagnostics, held-out comparison, and a governance memo; no live dashboard or recommendation.","confidence":"MODERATE","assumptions":["One quantitative analyst for roughly 0.15-0.25 FTE-year plus limited municipal-budget and legal review.","Most records are already digitized and authorized; extensive transcription, litigation review, or proprietary-data acquisition is excluded.","Resource equivalents apply overhead to BLS wage anchors and are not procurement quotes."],"source_ids":["S4","S8"]},"initial_deployment_startup":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Single-jurisdiction research prototype with reproducible data pipeline, access controls, model/residual/drift reports, facilitator interface, accessibility review, security review, retention rules, and user testing on historical scenarios.","confidence":"MODERATE","assumptions":["Approximately 0.5-1.5 combined professional FTE-years across data science, engineering, facilitation, budget analysis, legal/privacy, and evaluation.","Uses existing city identity, hosting, and records systems rather than procuring a new enterprise platform.","Excludes live decision influence."],"source_ids":["S2","S4","S7","S8"]},"operational_launch":{"band_2026_usd":"250K_TO_1M","scope":"One governed live-budget-cycle launch after retrospective success, including independent evaluation, facilitator staffing, training, monitoring, incident response, public-record handling, accessibility, security, and parallel operation of the ordinary issue-level process.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Requires explicit authorization by the responsible council body and cooperation from the executive budget team, clerk, central staff, and evaluator.","Includes one full cycle of intensive support and independent evaluation but no substantive-offer automation.","Range reflects governance and personnel uncertainty more than compute cost."],"source_ids":["S2","S3","S4","S8"]},"annual_recurring":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Annual refresh for one city: records ingestion, model re-estimation, validation, monitoring, audit, facilitator training, maintenance, retention compliance, and post-cycle reporting.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Roughly 0.4-1.2 combined FTE plus modest hosting and audit expenses.","No expansion to member-level scoring, private communications, or automated procedural action.","Material rule or data-system changes trigger revalidation rather than routine maintenance."],"source_ids":["S2","S4","S7","S8"]}},"verified_pipeline_gates":{"externally_supported_problem":{"status":"YES","reason":"Direct municipal research and current official budget rules show delays, bargaining conflict, deadlines, fiscal-discipline consequences, and service-delivery consequences, although not the hypothesized hidden mode.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S3"]},"externally_credible_adopter_or_authorizer":{"status":"YES","reason":"City councils and mayors are identifiable authorizers; Seattle's Council has already deployed an amendment tracker, demonstrating a concrete budget-monitoring workflow into which a retrospective study could fit.","source_ids":["S2","S3","S4"]},"distinct_testable_incremental_claim":{"status":"YES","reason":"The retained claim specifies the operator-based model, issue-gap-plus-deadline comparator, held-out metrics, stability/residual conditions, and procedural-lever requirement.","source_ids":["S4","S5","S6","S7"]},"bounded_next_evidence_step":{"status":"YES","reason":"An archival data audit and preregistered retrospective comparison can be time-boxed, stopped before live use, and evaluated against explicit falsifiers.","source_ids":["S4","S6","S7"]},"no_unresolved_safety_or_authority_stop":{"status":"YES","reason":"There is no evident stop for an authorized retrospective study limited to official aggregate records and evaluation-only reporting. This gate does not authorize live recommendations; those require a later local legal, records, ethics, and procedural-authority review.","source_ids":["S2","S3","S4"]},"credible_cost_scope_and_range":{"status":"YES","reason":"All four ranges have bounded scopes, staffing assumptions, and public wage anchors. Confidence remains low-to-moderate because no vendor quote or city-specific procurement estimate was obtained.","source_ids":["S8"]}},"next_evidence_step":"Run an eight-week partnered archival feasibility study in one consenting city. Before modeling, inventory every formally tabled full package, amendment, recorded vote, and dated fiscal forecast from one completed budget process; stop immediately if the records cannot produce a reproducible sequence of aggregate state snapshots without private communications or subjective motive coding. Pre-register at most eight coordinates, the effective sample-size/rank rule, regularization, stability boundary, bootstrap mode-angle tolerance, spectral-gap and residual thresholds, and two comparators: (1) separate issue gaps plus time-to-deadline and (2) the official amendment/package tracker plus facilitator-coded observable shocks. Use forward-chaining held-out evaluation. Advance only if a mode is stable across resamples, materially improves the predeclared prediction or reconstruction metric over both comparators, survives exclusion of shock rounds, and maps selectively to a reversible procedure already within the authorizer's rules. Falsify if records are insufficient, rank/linear-consistency diagnostics fail, modes rotate or swap under minor perturbation, residuals retain consequential structure, comparator performance is equal or better, or sensitivity results are nonselective. Do not issue a live recommendation.","blocking_evidence":["No direct evidence that any city has enough comparable, independent, within-process full-state observations to estimate an eight-dimensional transition operator reliably.","No retrospective demonstration of a stable spectral gap, stable mode shape, acceptable structured residual, or held-out advantage over issue-gap and deadline baselines.","No causal or experimental evidence that agenda reordering, package separation, joint briefings, or simultaneous clarification selectively dampens an identified mode rather than merely correlating with changing negotiations.","No expressed adopter demand for modal analysis and no city-specific authorization for a facilitator to use it during live bargaining.","No completed local legal assessment covering public records, deliberative privilege, retention, accessibility, procurement, and publication of derived political analytics.","No independent evidence that the dashboard avoids redistribution of agenda power, strategic gaming, implicit actor blame, or displacement of conflict into omitted dimensions."],"research_disposition":"PARTNERED_RESEARCH_PROGRAM","world_novelty_boundary":"The bounded search found adjacent official dashboards, negotiation-support systems, multidimensional process analysis, and established dynamic-mode methods, but did not measure world novelty, patentability, freedom to operate, market size, or realized impact. Absence of an exact match in these searches is not evidence that no such application exists.","arm":"PROPOSAL_FIRST","candidate_version":0,"controller_recommendation":{"action":"STOP_EMPIRICAL_RESEARCH_NEEDED","repairable":true,"material_progress_observed":true,"progress_targets":["Secure one city's written authorization and records inventory for a completed budget process without using private communications.","Demonstrate that the archive yields enough comparable full-state transitions to satisfy a preregistered rank and effective-sample rule.","Beat both the issue-gap-plus-deadline baseline and the official tracker-plus-observable-shocks baseline on forward-held-out data.","Show bootstrap-stable mode directions, usable spectral separation, and no structured high-consequence residual.","Obtain local legal, records, accessibility, and procedural-authority approval before any live use.","Pre-register a reversible procedural-lever test and independent safety evaluation; prohibit actor scoring and substantive recommendations."],"reason":"Web research verifies a meaningful workflow problem, plausible institutional authorizers, and substantial adjacent prior art, but it cannot determine whether city records support a stable operator or whether a modal recommendation improves outcomes safely. Resolving those questions requires partnered archival data construction and empirical testing, and any intervention-effect claim ultimately requires authorized live or quasi-experimental evidence."}}