# Te Pā Governance Audit Report

This first audit frames Te Pā as a living governance system made of feedback loops, information flows, decision routes, delays, rules, and pathway capacities. The purpose is not to flatten politics into metrics, but to make the system inspectable enough to identify where intervention is most urgent and where deep leverage sits.

All nodes, loops, and comparison axes referenced below cite public sources — repo files, government pages, and published governance documents — following the same provenance convention as the observatory's indicator sources.

## Audit priorities

### Critical
- **Feedback closure** — the biggest gap is not whether people can speak, but whether they can see that anything changed after they spoke. ([Māori Data Governance Model](https://www.kahuiraraunga.io/))
- **Self-organisation** — the largest strategic distance between the current system and the rhizome target sits in pathway autonomy, emergence, and distributed initiative.

### High
- **Authority distribution** — formal governance still appears more centralised than the desired pathway model. ([Charities Services](https://www.charities.govt.nz/im-a-registered-charity/running-your-charity/))
- **Information flow** — feedback and governance reasoning are not yet consistently visible at the right system nodes. ([Office of the Ombudsman · OIA](https://www.ombudsman.parliament.nz/what-ombudsman-can-help/official-information))
- **Delay visibility** — bottlenecks likely exist, but they are not tracked in a way that makes them governable.

### Medium
- **Rule depth** — governance rules are already a comparative strength because Māori control is explicit; the task is to preserve this while scaling pathway autonomy. ([Te Mana Raraunga · principles](https://www.temanararaunga.maori.nz/tutohinga))

## Priority interventions

### 1. Build visible feedback closure
- Add a public or semi-public "you said / we changed" log.
- Close discussion loops after decisions and revisions.
- Tag feedback by governance, content, and infrastructure category.

### 2. Delegate bounded pathway authority
- Define which decisions can move from trustees to pathway stewards.
- Pilot one pathway with explicit bounded powers.
- Publish role boundaries so legitimacy is not confused with centralisation.

### 3. Make delays measurable
- Track moderation, review, translation, and onboarding delays.
- Publish simple turnaround indicators, following the same conventions as the observatory's indicator panels ([LEVERAGE_POINTS.md](../docs/LEVERAGE_POINTS.md)).
- Treat delay as a design problem, not a private frustration.

### 4. Strengthen information flow
- Create one canonical governance README.
- Publish short decision notes in plain language.
- Make onboarding routes and pathway expectations structurally visible.

## Meadows reading

The strongest intervention points here are not parameters or cosmetic process tweaks. They sit mainly at the level of information flows, feedback loops, self-organisation, and rules. That means the most meaningful gains will come from changing how decisions are seen, how communities receive closure, and how pathways gain bounded power — while keeping Māori control over the system's rules intact.

## Next step

Use the dashboard at [`governance.html`](../governance.html) to validate these findings with whānau, kaitiaki, and collaborators, then update `data/governance-graph.json` and `data/comparison.json` through PRs so every revision has a public provenance trail.