Gov/en/Portal:R&D/Innovations:Participative Agreement Design

💡 In simple words: On WikiDeal, everyone can help design fair deals. People suggest ideas, discuss them and improve them together, and lawyers check the results. Agreements are built by many hands, like a Wikipedia article, instead of being written by one company alone.

🎯 In 20 seconds (scientific summary): Initial hypothesis, foundational innovation number one: participative agreement design. The innovation is not the technical fact of running two platforms; it is the participative design of agreements and of the whole contributive ecosystem built around them: compensatory measures, amendments, concrete use cases, legal references, common errors, alerts, expected-results models and quality criteria, all intended to be endorsed by lawyers. The underlying wager: non-experts can contribute usefully to the design of agreements. The double platform (contract models endorsed by lawyers, smartphone applications built on those models) remains as the supporting technical architecture.

On this page:

• What is it?
• Not only contracts: a whole contributive ecosystem
• Participative contributions and debates
• The wager: non-experts can contribute
• Technical element: the double platform
• State of the art
• Status

Participative Agreement Design

Foundational innovation, WikiDeal R&D. Status: initial hypothesis, basis for discussion. This innovation was previously presented under the name "Double Platform"; the double platform is now described as a technical element (see below).

What is it?

Participative agreement design is the first foundational concept of WikiDeal, the innovation that carries all the others together with Wikipedia Governance. The initial hypothesis is that fair agreements are best designed in the open, by the people who use them, through the same participative culture that produced Wikipedia: agreements drafted collaboratively (see Collaborative Contract Editing) and endorsed by lawyers who take named responsibility for them (see Peer Endorsement).

The innovation is not the technical fact of having two platforms. It is the participative design of the agreements themselves: how their clauses, safeguards and success conditions are proposed, debated, tested and refined by the community, then reviewed by professionals.

The contracts are intended to be fair, balanced and consumer approved: reviewed and approved by user and consumer groups. Participative agreement design aims at serving the interests of users and providers, not the interests of third-party structures.

Not only contracts: a whole contributive ecosystem

What lawyers are intended to endorse (acknowledge, taking named responsibility) is not limited to the agreements themselves. The initial hypothesis covers the whole contributive ecosystem built around each agreement:

• compensatory measures: predefined remedies for common failures such as late delivery, non-payment or partial fulfilment;
• amendments: versioned adjustments allowing an agreement to evolve instead of being torn up and renegotiated from scratch;
• concrete use cases: documented real-life scenarios showing how a contract model behaves in practice;
• legal references: the laws and regulations each clause relies on;
• common errors: recurring mistakes observed in the field, documented so that others can avoid them;
• alerts: warning triggers (late delivery, non-payment, anomaly detection) built into the contract lifecycle;
• expected-results models: explicit descriptions of what a successful outcome looks like;
• quality criteria: the standards a contribution is expected to meet before it is integrated.

The key existing model for this ecosystem lives in the Market space: the Contract Structures: State & Transition Framework describes how a WikiDeal agreement is intended to move through lifecycle states, and its Success Conditions Toolkit gathers the corresponding levers (adaptive modalities, compensatory measures, mediation and arbitration dynamics, fraud management, alert management, diagnostic procedures). This page does not duplicate that framework; it presents the innovation that is intended to make it participative.

Participative contributions and debates

The value of this ecosystem is expected to come from participative contributions and from the debates they trigger: open discussions on the levers that allow durably equitable relations between parties. Which compensatory measure is proportionate? Which amendment keeps a deal fair when circumstances change? Which alert protects the weaker party without burdening the other? Each contribution taken alone is small; together, the contributions are intended to form one whole, in the same way that thousands of small edits form an encyclopedia article. This is the logic of commons-based peer production (see State of the art) applied to agreements rather than to knowledge.

The wager: non-experts can contribute

Participative agreement design rests on an explicit wager: non-experts can contribute usefully to the design of agreements. A long-established legal principle states that ignorance of the law excuses no one: every person is presumed capable of knowing the law that binds them. In the same spirit, WikiDeal starts from the symmetric proposition: everyone is capable of making proposals. If the law expects everyone to understand the rules they live under, then everyone can also be trusted to suggest improvements to the agreements they live with. Expertise remains essential, but it is placed at the review stage, with lawyers endorsing the results, rather than at the entry gate. This wager echoes the plain language movement, which holds that legal and administrative texts can and should be understandable by their readers.

Technical element: the double platform

The innovation is supported by a technical architecture element, the double platform:

• One side: contract models endorsed by lawyers. A public library of contract bases and models, drafted collaboratively and endorsed by lawyers who take named responsibility for them.
• Other side: smartphone applications built on those models, intended to make the contracts usable in everyday marketplace transactions.

The double platform matters as infrastructure, but it is an implementation choice, not the innovation itself; other architectures could serve the same participative design.

State of the art

Participative agreement design assembles several well-documented research streams: participatory design and co-design, user-driven innovation, commons-based peer production, participatory governance of shared resources, and legal design.

• Douglas Schuler and Aki Namioka (eds.), 1993, Participatory Design: Principles and Practices, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. The reference book of the participatory design tradition, born in Scandinavian workplaces, where the future users of a system take part in designing it.
• Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders and Pieter Jan Stappers, 2008, Co-creation and the new landscapes of design, CoDesign, 4(1), pages 5-18. A widely cited account of the shift from user-centred design to co-design, where "the person formerly known as the user" becomes a design partner.
• Eric von Hippel, 2005, Democratizing Innovation, MIT Press (full text freely available). Von Hippel documents empirically that users, not only manufacturers, are the source of many important innovations.
• Yochai Benkler, 2002, Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm, The Yale Law Journal, 112(3), pages 369-446. The founding article on commons-based peer production: how large numbers of loosely coordinated volunteers can produce complex, high-quality goods (see also the Wikipedia article on the paper itself).
• Elinor Ostrom, 1990, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge University Press. Ostrom (Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, 2009) showed that communities can design and enforce their own rules for governing shared resources.
• Margaret Hagan, 2019, Participatory Design for Innovation in Access to Justice, Dædalus, 148(1). From the Stanford Legal Design Lab; see also her open online book Law by Design on making legal systems usable by non-lawyers.

Status

This page reformulates the first foundational innovation of WikiDeal, previously presented as "Double Platform" (renamed in August 2026). The concept is an initial hypothesis of the WikiDeal R&D programme; its formulation is open for discussion.

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See also: All innovations · Contract Structures · Collaborative Contract Editing · Peer Endorsement · R&D Portal