That's fine by me. The Intent definition is probably the one most in debate because we had inadvertently defined it multiple times and I don't recall the final resolution.
My main intent (sic) in the proposed definitions was to lead into a connection between social structure and governance. The visual model would be
1.1.1 Social Structures and Governance
A social structure may or may not have a formal governance structure. For example, a group of individuals may agree that every Wednesday night those who can be at a certain gym will choose teams and play basketball. There is only a loose understanding, possibly resulting in too many people some nights and too few on others, but that may be sufficient for the needs of the participants. A formalization would be to organize a league with identifiable teams and a schedule of play. This formalization introduces the rudimentary levels of governance.
Given that SOA mediates important aspect of participant relationships, it follows that there are rights and responsibilities that require enforcement by the social structure and that the SOA itself must reflect the requirements of the social structure itself. In the Reference Architecture, we are concerned primarily with social structures that reflect the anticipated participants in SOA-based systems; these are often embodied in legal and quasi-legal frameworks; i.e., they have some rules that are commonly understood.
For example, a corporation is a common kind of social structure, as is a fishing club. At the other extreme, the legal frameworks of entire countries and regions also count as social structures.
It is not necessarily the case that the social structures involved in a service interaction are explicitly identified by the participants. For example, when a customer buys a book over the Internet, the social structure that defines the validity of the transaction is often the legal framework of the region associated with the book vendor. This legal jurisdiction qualification is typically buried in the fine print of the service description.
The models for governance are introduced under the Owning SOA view, but here we discuss consistency with the model for social structure.
Governance
Governance is establishing the necessary framework and processes to formalize the rights and responsibilities defined by the social structure.
The motivation for establishing a social structure is to organize a group of participants around predictable rules and responsibilities, and to have a system in which there can be enforcement of the same.
There are numerous parallels between the social structure model in Figure 8 and the governance models in the Owning a SOA view:
· For formal governance, the collective social structure identifies Leadership as a focal point.
· Whereas the less formal social structure defines expectations in the form of rights and responsibilities and an appropriate level of enforcement (e.g. someone could become a social outcast), the more formal Leadership puts governance mechanisms in place so there are safeguards for clarity and fair treatment.
· The parallels between a general social structure and formal governance proceed through to ad hoc agreements vs. formal management and commonly desired real world effects.
As a participant can be a member of more than one social structure, so a participant can fall under more than one governance structure. These may be hierarchical or parallel chains with overlapping and possibly inconsistent goals.