The matryoshka transitions — Community → City → Region

Two scale-boundaries are inside the governance matryoshka — the nested Community → City → Region structure. Beyond Region the table ends because the matryoshka ends — Bioregion and Planet are not aggregation transitions and their rules are addressed in Boundary Context.

Pillar Community → City City → Region
▔ Governance ceiling — aggregation matryoshka stops here ▔
Above the ceiling

Bioregion and Planet are not aggregation transitions.

The Vivanco framework's role-table is explicit: Community is operational, City and Region are governance, Bioregion and Planet are boundary. There is no “Region → Bioregion” aggregation rule because no human institution at the Bioregion scale receives a composite from below and acts on it. Bioregional biocapacity and planetary boundaries are read — they constrain what the Region score can be called successful. See the Boundary Context surface for the full reference dashboard.

Methodology gap — surfaced honestly

Governance × (City → Region) is the thinnest transition in v0. When only 3 of N municipalities publish open data of comparable cadence, the Region open-data score should not be a weighted mean over all N. The methodology v0 does not yet specify whether thin-coverage cells use (a) confidence-weighted mean with an explicit confidence pill, (b) a hard coverage-threshold below which the cell reads structural placeholder, or (c) a Bayesian update over prior publication. Until the rule is specified, the dashboard cannot render Governance × Region's score honestly. This is an open methodology question in v0, in review toward v1.

Three other transitions have similar but less acute under-specification — Economic × (Community → City) on the MRL projection function; Environmental × (City → Region) on EUROSTAT MFA (material-flow accounting) lag handling; Social × (City → Region) on the MSA (metropolitan statistical area) threshold.

The composite each tier computes

At each tier the score is the FCI formula computed over the cells assigned to that tier. Per-tier FCI is then carried up via the method named in the table above. The composite formula is the same at each ring of the matryoshka:

Where DIDO (data in, data out — the capacity side) is the weighted mean of the cell-tier DIDO components, PITO (products in, trash out — the extractive side) is the corresponding composite, and ρ is the action-latency coefficient measured at the tier the observation lives in — and only where a fitted-response protocol exists at that tier. Region-tier ρ is currently mock — ρ protocol pending: no partner operates a regional policy-adoption tracker, so it renders with the mock label until a protocol is specified. ρ is never silently defaulted to 1.

specified Methodology v0 has named the method and signed it off. draft Method named but not yet signed off; subject to revision. open Methodology gap; rendering decisions blocked.

Confidence is the dashboard team's assessment of whether the rendered score is currently defensible under methodological review. Very low confidence means the rendered score should carry the structural-placeholder hatch in the matrix view.

↪ Next: see the prefix relationship drawn out in the drilldown · or return to the aggregation atlas.

methodology v0 · beta — comments: [email protected]