Governance refers to the system of process by which a group, organization or society makes decisions, establishes rules, and ensures that they’re implemented appropriately. In Geo, governance plays an important part in ensuring that spaces are governed correctly and information is kept verifiable and trusted, promoting curation and validity.

In Geo, every space has one of two governance types - personal or public - which are predefined based on the space type template selected when a user creates a new space or by manual selection if you create a blank space.

Personal governance allows members and editors to make changes to a space without a 24 hour voting period. This type of governance is found on Person, Protocol, Nonprofit and DAO space types where the information presented is updated by the editors who have the most up to date and verifiable information.

Public governance allows members and editors to propose edits to a space with a 24 hour voting period for almost every proposal. The only proposal that is exempt from this a new member request to the space where one editor can accept or reject immediately. This type of governance is found on Project, Industry, Governmental organization, Academic field and Region space types.

An edit is a proposed set of changes that affects the space content. All editors and members can view active and past edits within the ‘Governance’ tab on the space itself in an overview format, and then this can be interacted with further to see the exact changes that have been proposed as well as who has voted on the edit.

In a space with public governance, creating a proposal is as simple as making edits to a space, reviewing those edits, adding an edit name and publishing for editor review. In a personal space, any editor can make edits in the same way except there is no review process - edits get published instantly.

Editors review edits in what’s commonly known as a ‘diff view’ where the editor can see the current state of the edit on the left and the proposed edits on the right. Editors vote on whether they think the edits made are useful and beneficial to the development of the space by either rejecting or accepting the edit, and at the end of a 24 hour period the edits are either accepted and published to the space, or rejected.

As a user on Geo you can request to join any space as a member or editor, and it is up to the decision of the editors to either accept or reject your request. As an editor of a space, you can find all editor and member requests on your personal home displayed in card format. Member requests only require one editor vote to accept and are instantaneous, whilst editor requests require a full 24 hour vote with a 51% pass rate to be accepted.

For edits that require a vote, there is a 24 hour voting period where any editor can accept or reject the edit. To be accepted, a vote must end with 51% or more acceptance rate from all of the editors who voted. To be rejected, a vote must end with a 51% or more rejection rate from all of the editors who voted.

A vote can be automatically rejected earlier than 24 hours if the number of editors left to vote cannot put the total pass percentage above 51%. For example, an editor of a space with nine other editors proposes to edit the space cover image. Six of the editors reject the edit within 6 hours, meaning that the remaining editors cannot push the pass rate above 51% if they voted to accept; the edit gets automatically rejected before the 24 hour voting period ends.