Dispute Intake Form¶
Intake artifact — instantiates Alignment Governance and Dispute Resolution
A structured entry template that turns a raised grievance into a complete, routable case at the moment of filing — capturing the issue, the parties and their standing, the decision sought, evidence, and urgency.
A Dispute Intake Form is the front door: a single fill-in template that converts a hallway complaint into a well-formed case the governance system can actually route. Its defining trait is that it works on one dispute at the instant it is raised — it is not a running log and it does not decide anything. What it does is force the raiser to supply, up front, the fields a forum needs before it can act: what the misalignment is, who is party to it, on whose behalf the raiser has standing to speak, what decision they are asking for, what evidence backs it, and how urgent it is. By making those fields mandatory, the form is where a diffuse frustration becomes a claim with a name attached, and where the question "do you even have standing to raise this?" is answered before the case moves any further.
Example¶
An open-source software foundation stewarding a widely used library keeps losing maintainers to ugly, unstructured blowups — a contributor posts an angry thread accusing a maintainer of merging around review, others pile on, and the governance council can never tell what is actually being asked of it. The foundation adds a Dispute Intake Form to its governance repo. To open a governance dispute you must now file an issue against a template: Nature of the dispute (priority, conduct, technical authority, license, or roadmap), Parties named, Your standing (maintainer, active contributor in the last 90 days, downstream packager, or end user), Decision requested, Evidence links, and Urgency.
A contributor files one: nature = technical authority; parties = herself and the lead maintainer; standing = active contributor, 40 merged PRs this quarter; decision requested = a ruling on whether the maintainer may bypass the two-reviewer rule for security patches; evidence = three commit links; urgency = medium. The council now has, in one artifact, a bounded question, verified standing, and the material to route it — instead of a 200-comment thread. The form made none of the decision; it made the decision possible by delivering a complete, standing-checked case.
How it works¶
The form's method is field design under two constraints. First, completeness gating: required fields mean an incomplete grievance cannot enter as a case — the raiser is bounced back to supply the decision requested or the evidence, which alone kills a large share of vague escalations. Second, standing capture: a dedicated field makes the raiser declare the basis on which they are entitled to be heard, and a lightweight rule (self-declared, or checked against a roster) separates materially affected parties from bystanders[1] without turning every observer into a veto player. The distinctive discipline is minimal sufficient structure — enough fields that a forum can route and rank the case, few enough that filing stays cheaper than working around the process. The output is a single normalized record; what happens to it next belongs to other mechanisms.
Tuning parameters¶
- Field strictness — how many fields are mandatory versus optional. More required fields yield cleaner, more routable cases but raise the filing cost and can deter legitimate raisers with a real but half-formed concern.
- Standing threshold — how demanding the standing field is (open to anyone, versus proof of material effect). A high bar filters noise and forum-shopping; too high a bar silences affected parties who lack formal status.
- Anonymity / protection — whether a raiser may file confidentially. Protection surfaces disputes people fear to name, at the cost of the accused's ability to face specifics.
- Triage tagging — whether the form asks the raiser to self-classify type and urgency. Self-tagging speeds routing but invites urgency inflation, so tags are advisory, not binding.
When it helps, and when it misleads¶
Its strength is that it gives misalignment a recognized route in — the single most load-bearing thing a governance system can offer, because a conflict with nowhere legitimate to go becomes a hidden workaround or a side-channel escalation. A good form also front-loads standing, so the forum never wastes a session discovering that the loudest raiser had no stake.
It misleads when the form becomes a gate that quietly rejects real disputes on formality — a missing field or an unmet standing bar used to bounce an inconvenient complaint is intake theater, a route that looks open but isn't. It can also lull a system into thinking that capturing a dispute is the same as handling one; a full intake queue with no forum behind it just documents neglect. The guarding discipline is to treat the form as a doorway, not a filter of last resort: keep the required fields to the genuine minimum, review rejected filings periodically for wrongful bounces, and make sure every completed intake is guaranteed a forum and a clock.
How it implements the components¶
misalignment_intake_channel— the form is the channel realized as an artifact: the recognized, always-open place a raiser enters a misalignment as a structured case rather than a complaint.stakeholder_standing_model— the standing field and its checking rule are where the archetype's model of who-may-be-heard is applied to a concrete filing, separating affected parties from bystanders.
It captures a single case at entry but does NOT track cases to closure or accumulate their history (follow_through_loop, precedent_library — that is the Conflict Register, its nearest twin: the form opens one case, the register watches the whole caseload). It also sets no escalation thresholds and issues no ruling.
Related¶
- Instantiates: Alignment Governance and Dispute Resolution — supplies the intake-and-standing front door the rest of the pathway depends on.
- Sibling mechanisms: Conflict Register · Escalation Threshold Table · Governance Cadence Meeting · Review Board or Panel · Ruling or Decision Memo · Decision-Rights Matrix · Mediation Session Protocol
Editorial Notes¶
Form Classification¶
Form family: Interface, Display & Cue
Rationale: Dispute Intake Form operates as a user-facing prompt, display, template, or perceptual cue that shapes attention and action at the point of use because it a structured entry template that turns a raised grievance into a complete, routable case at the moment of filing — capturing the issue, the parties and their standing, the decision sought, evidence, and urgency.
Independent corroboration: The frozen evidence defines Dispute Intake Form as 'A structured entry template that turns a raised grievance into a complete, routable case at the moment of filing — capturing the issue, the parties and their standing, the decision sought, evidence, and urgency', so its operative form is Interface, Display & Cue.
Nearest alternative: Representation, Specification & Plan — Required fields and standing capture make the filing form a point-of-entry affordance, not merely a static template.
Review outcome: Independent reviewer agreement; medium confidence.
Origin Attribution¶
Primary origin: Law & Governance
Origin pattern: Single lineage
Present-day reach: Multi-domain
Rationale: Legal and quasi-judicial procedure cohered structured pleadings and intake around parties, standing, requested relief, evidence, and urgency.
Related originating lineages:
- Public Administration & Policy — Administrative grievance systems adapted standardized intake for routing cases to competent forums.
Review resolution: Both current reviews place dispute_intake_form primarily in law_governance; the reconciled classification retains only lineages that materially shaped the mechanism and keeps breadth of origin separate from reach.
Review outcome: Reconciled after independent review; high confidence.
References¶
[1] Supreme Court of the United States. Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555 (1992). Requires standing to rest on a concrete and particularized injury that personally affects the plaintiff rather than a generalized public interest. registry ↩