{
  "id": "council.governance",
  "term": "council",
  "sense": "governance",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 8,
  "arena": "council",
  "domain": "social",
  "style": null,
  "definition": "a group of people in a meeting to act for a community",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "people.social",
      "meeting.social",
      "act.deed",
      "community.social",
      "groups.collection"
    ],
    "interaction": "people come together in a meeting and act as a group",
    "novel_properties": [
      "collective decision-making",
      "representation of community interests",
      "organized group action"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "The Iroquois Confederacy's Grand Council met for centuries to govern through consensus among six nations.",
      "domain": "institutions"
    },
    {
      "text": "In 2023, the Kerala State Disaster Management Authority convened a council to coordinate monsoon relief across districts.",
      "domain": "governance"
    },
    {
      "text": "The Internet Engineering Task Force holds biannual meetings where a council of volunteers ratifies new protocol standards.",
      "domain": "computing"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "council",
    "councils"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "openrouter:openai/gpt-oss-120b",
    "date": "2026-07-29",
    "confidence": 0.6,
    "reconciled": {
      "by": "openrouter:qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b-2507",
      "date": "2026-07-31",
      "changed": "definition",
      "note": "Added missing constitutive components that the definition relies on: act.deed, community.social, and groups.collection. Definition remained correct as-is."
    }
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-council.governance"
}