A public framework for evaluating whether institutions and systems that hold power over people remain accountable, interruptible, reversible, and bounded.
The Bounded Power Framework is a structural diagnostic tool. Anyone can use it to produce a public, written analysis of an authority that affects them — a police department, a hospital system, a credit-scoring vendor, a homeowners' association, a regulatory agency, a digital platform — without needing the authority's cooperation, legal training, or institutional access.
The framework is built around one question:
Is this authority structured to remain stoppable, correctable, and bounded — or has it grown past the point where it can still be changed?
The output of using the framework is a completed Registration Form — a structured public document that surfaces an authority's scope, harms, dependencies, stop paths, and oversight gaps in a way most disclosure regimes never force into one place.
The framework supports one kind of record with two kinds of filers:
A third party — citizen, journalist, researcher, or civic actor — analyzing an authority from public sources. Anyone affected by an authority can produce a Mechanism Record analyzing it, using publicly available information. Third-party records carry the PUBLIC SOURCES ONLY banner at the top and bottom — signaling that the record has not been confirmed by the authority it describes.
The authority being analyzed. An authority can file a Mechanism Record about itself as a public act of structural disclosure, or file corrections to a third-party-produced record that already exists about it. When the authority files, the record's status flips to ACTIVE and the PUBLIC SOURCES ONLY banner is removed.
The same form, the same rules, and the same SCBP-09 numerical bounds apply to both.
The easiest way to use the framework is the AI Registration Bundle: a single file you paste into any AI chat tool (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or similar).
Open the bundle, copy its entire contents, paste into an AI chat, and tell the AI which authority you want analyzed. The AI produces a completed structural diagnostic that you can download.
For a fuller walk-through, see How to run a citizen inquiry.
Power should be:
- strong enough to perform necessary functions
- limited enough to remain accountable
- understandable enough to be audited
- replaceable enough to be corrected
- stable enough to preserve continuity
- restrained enough to serve rather than dominate
The framework treats these as structural requirements, not aspirations. When power lacks any of them, the gap is itself a finding.
For anyone wanting to understand the framework before using it:
- Start Here — the on-ramp
- Reasoning: Bounded Power — why power should be kept small
- Reasoning: Governance — how this applies to institutional design
- Reasoning: Land Use — application to land use and civic infrastructure
- FAQ
- How to run a citizen inquiry
- AI Registration Bundle — the working file
- 00-Reading — conceptual orientation, reasoning, the AI Registration Bundle, and the citizen inquiry guide
- 01-Framework — the nine core framework documents (SCBP-01 through SCBP-09), including the Structural Constitution (SCBP-04) and Registry Acceptance Standards (SCBP-09)
- 02-Forms — the Registration Form and the Stop Trigger / Violation Report Form
- 03-Examples — 25 worked diagnostics of authority types (police departments, hospitals, platforms, HOAs, credit bureaus, and more)
- 04-Registry — the public archive of Mechanism Records and Violation Reports
- 05-Reference — supporting documents: registry charter, data schema, registration process methodology, findability guidance
- 99-Archive — historical versions of forms and operating documents
- governments and regulatory agencies
- police, courts, prosecutors, prisons, and immigration enforcement
- hospitals, health insurers, and credit-reporting bureaus
- schools, universities, and family services
- corporations, platforms, and payment processors
- nonprofits, religious institutions, and homeowners' associations
- voluntary advocacy and mutual aid networks
- AI governance and algorithmic decision systems
- land use and civic infrastructure systems
The framework is in active development. The framework documents — the Structural Constitution, the Registry Charter, the Registration Form, SCBP-REG-0001, and the example records — describe the intended steady state of a public registry and framework custodian. They are usable today as design documents and as working tools: anyone can produce a structural diagnostic of an authority right now using the AI Registration Bundle.
The registry — the place where completed registrations and diagnostics are publicly archived — currently lives in this collection. Submissions are accepted by GitHub pull request, by GitHub issue, or by email to BoundedPowerFoundation@proton.me. There is no submission fee, no review queue, and no editorial gatekeeping; submissions are reviewed informally and as time permits.
The Bounded Power Foundation is the proposed name for a future custodial body that would maintain the registry as independent civic infrastructure. It does not currently exist as an incorporated organization. Operational capacity for the registry — review, response, intake processing — is being built incrementally. The framework's institutional language throughout these documents describes the intended steady state rather than current operational capacity.
Civilization should become wiser and easier to sustain over time — not harder to repair.
The Bounded Power Framework is one attempt to think seriously about that challenge, and to put structural-disclosure tools in the hands of ordinary people who live inside systems they did not design.