Each concept is read twice: whether the approach carries it, and whether the approach's own sources claim it. A concept that is absent and was never claimed is a gap in the field rather than a failure of the work, and is marked out of scope.
Many centers under shared meta-rules
PartialClaimed · partialDefinition · Michael Polanyi, The Logic of Liberty (1951)
Many independent decision centers, each acting on its own — but under one common framework of rules that all of them acknowledge. The shared framework is what makes it a system rather than a scatter.
Analysis
Both halves come closer here than anywhere else in the cell. Each community authors its own executable procedures and those procedures actually govern its actions, and every community runs on the same engine, whose primitives define what counts as an action, a vote or an appeal; Modular Politics then argues for the common layer directly, proposing an open standard for networked governance. What the centers share is nonetheless a substrate rather than meta-rules: the runtime constrains the form of a policy, not the limits of what a policy may do to a member, and the standard that would carry more than form is a call.
Overlapping jurisdiction
AbsentNot claimed · out of scopeDefinition · Vincent Ostrom, Tiebout & Warren (1961)
The centers' authority overlaps on purpose — the same case can fall under more than one — and the friction between them is treated as a feature, worked out through interaction rather than prevented by a clean division of turf.
Analysis
What passes between the centers is components and data, not authority: a module that travels from one community to another is still applied by that community to its own cases. Vincent Ostrom's condition is that the same case falls under more than one center and the friction between them is worked out through interaction, and neither paper describes an act that two communities' policies both govern. The appeal steps PolicyKit supports run inside a single community's own procedure.
Subsidiarity and nesting
PartialNot claimedDefinition · Johannes Althusius (1603); Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990)
Decisions are made at the most local level capable of making them, and local units nest inside larger ones that handle what the local level cannot. Authority is layered — neither centralized nor flatly fragmented.
Analysis
Authority sits at the local level and is exercised there: a community sets its own votes, juries and term limits instead of receiving them from the platform, which is subsidiarity's direction of travel and further than the rest of this cell gets. The nesting is what is absent. Neither paper states which decisions belong to the community and which to the layer above it, and nothing takes up a matter a community cannot settle, a dispute with another community above all. Drawing on Institutional Analysis and Development while omitting nested enterprises is a pointed gap.