TIME is the model this wiki uses to read the valley’s history. It asks one question of each period: how did people organise themselves to share land and work? Its name comes from the first letters of the four forms of organisation it describes.
| Form | How people organise | Pages |
|---|---|---|
| T: Tribes | Through kinship and belonging. What you give and get depends on your family and your people. | Tribes |
| I: Institutions | Through written rules and the authority of leaders, in fixed settlements. | Institutions |
| M: Markets | Through exchange at a price. | Markets |
| E: Emergent | By sharing what they hold in common and caring for the land together, linked to similar places around the world. | Emergent |
Each new form is added to the ones before it, and none comes to a close. The older forms carry on alongside the newer ones and keep shaping them. What changes is which form is most dominant: the one that decides most about who gets land and work.
TIME builds on the TIMN framework of the American researcher David Ronfeldt, whose fourth form was Networks.
TIME on this wiki
The Valley Through TIME sets out when each form was most dominant in the valley, and the main developments in each, from the first people to 2038. The Laws That Shaped the Valley reads each law by the forms it built up or held back. Several other history pages end with a section that reads their subject through the model.
Using TIME for difficult decisions, an essay by Michael Haupt, shows the model at work in the Forum’s first meeting, where one proposal was read in four different ways [MS].
Which form was most dominant in a period is the Forum’s reading of the history, and it carries no fact-status tag. Residents may read the same history differently, and the pages will change as they say so.
The full framework
This page gives the short version. The full framework, including the organising logic of each form and how the Emergent form holds the other three, has its home on the BioConomy wiki: The TIME Framework.
Related
References
- BioConomy wiki. The TIME Framework. The full framework.
- Framer OS. Using TIME for difficult decisions (27 September 2026), by Michael Haupt. The model applied to a decision at the Forum’s first meeting.
- Ronfeldt, D. (1996). Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks: A Framework About Societal Evolution. RAND. The TIMN framework on which TIME builds.