Governance Frameworks for Artists: Why Creative Practice Needs Institutional Thinking
Governance Frameworks for Artists: Why Creative Practice Needs Institutional Thinking
The False Dichotomy
There’s a persistent assumption in creative communities that governance and creativity are opposed. Governance is bureaucracy, red tape, corporate overhead — the enemy of spontaneous creative expression. Artists create. Institutions govern. The two don’t mix.
This assumption is wrong, and it’s costly. Every artist who has lost track of which version of a project is current, abandoned a promising direction because it got tangled with something else, or found themselves unable to explain their own body of work to a funder or curator is suffering from a governance deficit. Not a creativity deficit — a governance deficit.
Governance, at its core, is the answer to three questions:
- What is the current state of everything I’m working on? (Registry)
- What rules govern how things change? (Constraints)
- How do I know the rules are being followed? (Audit)
These are not bureaucratic questions. They’re the questions every artist implicitly answers, usually inconsistently and in their head, when they decide what to work on next. Formal governance just makes the answers explicit, inspectable, and reliable.
What Governance Looks Like in Practice
Let me describe the governance framework I use for the eight-organ system — 97 repositories across 8 GitHub organizations — and then extract the patterns that apply to any creative practice, regardless of scale.
The Registry: Knowing What You Have
The registry is a single JSON file (registry-v2.json) that records the state of every project in the system. Each entry has:
- A name and description
- An implementation status (DESIGN_ONLY, SKELETON, PROTOTYPE, ACTIVE, ARCHIVED)
- A portfolio relevance score
- Metadata specific to the project’s domain
The registry is the single source of truth. If the registry says a project is ACTIVE, it’s ACTIVE. If it says ARCHIVED, it’s ARCHIVED. No ambiguity, no “well, I think that one is kind of dormant but I might come back to it.”
For artists at any scale: You don’t need a JSON file. You need a list. Every project you’re working on, with its current status. The specific format doesn’t matter — a spreadsheet, a Notion page, a paper notebook. What matters is that it exists, it’s complete (every project is listed), and it’s authoritative (you update it when things change).
The most common governance failure I see in creative practice: projects that exist in a quantum state of “I might still be working on that.” The registry forces a decision: is this active or not? That decision itself is valuable, because it converts ambient anxiety (“I have so many half-finished things”) into explicit state (“I have 12 active projects, 5 paused projects, and 3 archived projects”).
State Machines: Defining How Things Change
A state machine defines the lifecycle of a project: what states it can be in, and what conditions must be met to move between states.
The eight-organ system uses:
DESIGN_ONLY → SKELETON → PROTOTYPE → ACTIVE → ARCHIVED
Each transition has criteria:
- DESIGN_ONLY → SKELETON: Must have a README with project description
- SKELETON → PROTOTYPE: Must have tests and initial implementation
- PROTOTYPE → ACTIVE: Must have CI, documentation, and demonstrated functionality
- Any → ARCHIVED: Must have a rationale documented
For artists at any scale: Your state machine might be simpler:
IDEA → IN PROGRESS → COMPLETE → EXHIBITED/PUBLISHED → ARCHIVED
The specific states don’t matter. What matters is that transitions are deliberate. Moving a project from IDEA to IN PROGRESS is a decision — it means committing time and resources. Moving from IN PROGRESS to COMPLETE is a decision — it means declaring that the work meets your own quality standard. Making these transitions explicit prevents the most common creative failure mode: projects that drift from “in progress” to “abandoned” without anyone (including the artist) noticing.
Dependency Graphs: Understanding Relationships
Projects don’t exist in isolation. A research project informs a creative piece. A creative piece generates documentation. Documentation feeds the next research project. These relationships form a graph.
The eight-organ system makes this graph explicit: 31 validated edges connecting organs and repos. The key rule is that the graph must be acyclic — information flows in one direction. This prevents circular dependencies where two projects are each waiting on the other, and neither can progress.
For artists at any scale: Draw a map of how your projects relate. Which projects feed into which others? Which must be complete before others can start? You’ll likely discover:
- Some projects are blocked by other projects you haven’t touched in months
- Some projects have no dependencies and could be started (or finished) immediately
- Some projects form a cluster that should be sequenced, not pursued in parallel
This map is not a project management tool in the corporate sense. It’s a clarity tool. It shows you where your creative energy will actually flow versus where it will be blocked.
Audit Trails: Verifying the Rules
An audit trail records what changed, when, and why. In the eight-organ system, every registry update is a git commit with a message explaining the change. Automated audit workflows run weekly to verify that repos match their declared status.
For artists at any scale: The simplest audit trail is a dated changelog. When you start a new project, write down the date and why. When you abandon a project, write down the date and why. When you complete something, write down the date and what you learned.
This serves two purposes. First, it creates accountability — not to anyone else, but to yourself. You can look back and see patterns: “I start projects in January and abandon them in March” or “Every project that gets past week 3 eventually gets finished.” Second, it creates portfolio material. Funders and curators increasingly value process documentation alongside finished work. The audit trail is your artist statement, written in real time instead of retrospectively.
Common Objections
“This is too structured for creative work”
Creative work without structure produces chaos, not art. Every artistic discipline has structure: musical forms, poetic meters, narrative arcs, choreographic notation. Governance frameworks are structural support for the practice — the ongoing body of work — not for individual creative acts.
You don’t need governance to write a poem. You need governance to maintain a coherent body of work across dozens of projects over years. The structure supports the practice the way a skeleton supports a body: invisible when working well, painfully missed when absent.
“I don’t have enough projects to need this”
You might be right. If you have three projects and they’re all in your head without confusion, governance adds overhead without value. The inflection point in my experience is around 8–10 active projects. Below that, mental tracking works. Above that, you start losing state: forgetting what’s active, duplicating work, failing to connect related projects.
The eight-organ system has 97 projects. It could not exist without formal governance. But the governance patterns were useful well before 97 — they became essential around 20, and I wished I’d started them around 10.
“Governance kills spontaneity”
Governance operates at the practice level, not the session level. Within a working session, you’re free to follow intuition, explore tangents, start new things. Governance kicks in between sessions: which project do you pick up next? Which projects are active? Which need to be archived?
The spontaneity happens inside the work. The governance happens around the work. They’re not in conflict; they operate at different time scales.
“I’m not an institution, I’m an individual”
This is the most interesting objection because it reveals the real insight: every sustained creative practice is an institution, whether it acknowledges it or not.
An institution is a persistent entity that outlasts individual sessions, has accumulated state, follows (implicit or explicit) rules, and produces outputs over time. Your creative practice is exactly this. The question isn’t whether your practice is institutional — it is. The question is whether your institutional governance is explicit (and therefore inspectable, improvable, communicable) or implicit (and therefore inconsistent, opaque, and hard to explain to others).
Starting Points
If you’re convinced that some governance would help but aren’t sure where to start, here are three starting points ordered by effort:
Level 1: The List (30 minutes). Write down every project you’re working on, with its status (active, paused, idea, complete, abandoned). Just the act of making the list explicit will reveal things you didn’t know about your own practice.
Level 2: The State Machine (2 hours). Define 4-5 states that your projects move through. Define what it means to transition between states. Apply the states to your list. You’ll immediately see which projects are stuck in transitions.
Level 3: The Dependency Map (half a day). Draw the relationships between your projects. Identify clusters, sequences, and blockers. Use this map to decide what to work on next based on what will unblock the most downstream work.
You don’t need to reach Level 3. Level 1 alone — the authoritative list — will improve your practice more than any productivity tool or creative methodology. Because the first step in governing a creative practice is knowing what you’re governing.
The Return
The return on governance is legibility. Legibility to yourself: knowing what you’re working on, why, and what comes next. Legibility to others: being able to explain your practice to a funder, curator, or collaborator in terms that are specific, verifiable, and structured.
The eight-organ system is an extreme implementation of this principle — 97 projects governed by explicit state machines, dependency graphs, and automated audits. Most artists don’t need that level of infrastructure. But every artist who maintains a sustained practice — more than a few projects, over more than a few years — needs the underlying patterns: a registry, explicit state, deliberate transitions, and some form of audit trail.
Governance isn’t the opposite of creativity. It’s the infrastructure that lets creativity compound.
This essay is part of the ORGAN-V Public Process — building in public, documenting everything.
| *Related repos: orchestration-start-here | system-governance-framework | public-process* |