Petition-Based Governance

Petition-Based Governance is the constitutional description, adopted in the Fourth Concordance, of the Tower's practice of producing administrative reality through the receipt, registration and indefinite deferral of petitions. Under this description nothing in the Tower is established by decree; it is established by the lodging of a request that it be established, which request itself requires a prior authorization to request, which authorization is granted by a form obtained through petition. The Librarians maintain that this arrangement is self-evidently circular only to readers who have not finished the Concordance.

Origins

The doctrine is conventionally traced to the troubled interval following the Petition for the Authorization to Petition (Ref. #PR-001), submitted by Clerk Thelon during the 719th Synodic Cycle. Thelon had sought leave to submit a petition; the receiving office, finding no instrument by which such leave could be sought, returned the dossier unstamped. The resulting deadlock lasted eleven cycles and was resolved only by the creation of Form PA-1: Application for Petition Authorization, which permits a petitioner to apply for authorization to petition, but not — as the Margins Recension of the Third Concordance notes in a marginal hand — "to apply for authorization to apply." The same recension records that a Sub-Basement Clerk was subsequently reprimanded for pointing this out twice.

From this precedent the Tower derived its governing maxim, which hangs stitched into the linings of the reading-room coats on floors 88 through 94: "Nothing is done until something is asked."

The chain of initiation

Because the authorization to petition is itself petitioned for, every act of governance begins a regress that the Tower has chosen to regard as a feature. The chain of initiation begins with obtaining a Form PA-1: Application for Petition Authorization, proceeds through registration with a Petition Triage desk, and terminates, in the ordinary case, either in deferral or in the issuance of a Form P 112 7 by which a petitioner may challenge the documented existence of the very entity the petition concerns. A substantial proportion of Tower entities exist in the conditional mood, pending an outcome.

The practical consequence is that the Tower's holdings grow by accretion rather than flat. When the Petition of the Nine Gauges was lodged in the winter of the 722nd Cycle, it requested the establishment of a body to hear petitions concerning harmonic disturbance; the body so established, the Harmonic Anomalies Directorate, was immediately obliged to hear the Nine Gauges petition as its first matter, and has heard it continuously since. The Directorate's minutes record that the petition remains at first reading.

Obscurity and routing

Petitions are not answered in order of receipt. Under the Priority-by-Obscurity Model, dossiers are scored for the degree to which their subject is undocumented elsewhere in the Tower, and are routed by the Pneumatic Clarion Network toward those floors where the obscurity score is least likely to be disturbed. A petition concerning a well-catalogued matter descends; a petition concerning something that has never existed ascends and, in the phrase of the Second Concordance, "is not expected to return."

The model's defenders observe that it protects the archive from novelty shocks. Its critics observe that the Petition for Whispering Severance, concerning a matter of acknowledged obscurity, was routed upward in the 715th Cycle and has not been sighted below floor 300 since. The Network's calibration was last certified in the 717th Cycle; the certificate is filed in a drawer that cannot presently be opened, pending a petition.

Correspondent anonymity

All petitions are received under Correspondent Anonymity, the principle that the identity of any individual or group submitting a report, filing or petition must remain permanently obscured. The principle is administered with some severity: a petition whose text inadvertently identifies its submitter is returned, and the submitter is obliged to petition for the restoration of the identifying passage, which restoration cannot be granted while the petition to restore it identifies them. Clerks call this the closed loop and speak of it with professional respect.

Petitioners who wish to remain anonymous in a more thoroughgoing sense may lodge a Petition of Unresolved Cadence, which suspends the identity of the filer for the duration of the cadence and leaves only the rhythm of the request on record.

Disagreement among the Concordances

The Third Concordance, Annex 7, holds that governance by petition is strictly remediable — that every deferral is a temporary state awaiting an instrument — and that the Tower's true constitution is therefore an ordinary one, merely slow. The Fourth Concordance rejects this in its entirety, asserting at Article 2 that "the deferral is not the interval between the request and the answer; the deferral is the institution." The Sixth Concordance declined to settle the matter and instead fixed the width of the petition corridors on floors 41 to 46 at one and a half paces, which satisfied nobody and inconvenienced everybody.

"It is not the office of this Tower to conclude a matter, but to hold it open in good order."

— Fourth Concordance, Article 2, clause 4

Scholars of the Guild of Dormant Scribes, who hold archival custody of all dormant petitions, incline to the Fourth Concordance on the evidence of volume alone. The Guild's returns for the 723rd Cycle record 41,882 petitions received and 6 concluded, of which 4 were concluded by the withdrawal of the petitioner and 2 by the death of the office addressed.

Criticism and reform

Proposals for a Petition for a Eighth Concordance arise roughly once a generation and are themselves petitions, requiring authorization under a Form PA-1, and are therefore heard under the regime they seek to replace. The most recent, lodged in the 725th Cycle, requested simply that some matter somewhere be concluded, as a demonstration. It was scored for obscurity, routed by the Clarion Network, and is understood to be ascending.

The Librarians do not comment on the doctrine of petition-based governance. A notice posted at the head of the West Stairwell, under authority of the Wistful Balustrade Ruling, states only that petitioners should bring their own ink, and that the reading-room coats are not to be removed from the building.