Preface

Govonos was born from a clear necessity: to create a space where questions of governance, responsibility, and ethical measurement can be explored with a freedom, speed, and transversality that established institutions — public, economic, or academic — cannot always mobilize in time. To this necessity is added a deeper raison d'être: to formalize the principles that precede all governance. No academic framework is dedicated to this today. Govonos thus occupies a structural void, that of the very foundations of governance, where the conditions of possibility for all future regulation are forged.

From its origin, Govonos has been part of the continuity of an intuition formulated by its founder: authentically ethical governance must become tangible, measurable, and anchored in contractual loyalty. This idea, predating Govonos, opened a still informal conceptual field, articulating applied ethics, ex ante governance, and contractual behavior. This emerging field can be described as Tangible Governance and Contractual Ethics, or more broadly as a form of Contractual Anthropotechnology. Govonos does not claim its invention: it pursues its formalization, scientific organization, and academic structuring.

The requirement of this discipline stems from the need to connect dispersed knowledge — governance, institutional economics, moral psychology, sociology of obligations, systems engineering — and to produce standards, protocols, and empirical evidence. Govonos thus affirms the relevance and legitimacy of a new academic discipline, intended to be studied, deepened, and developed within the academic world.

In this dynamic, Govonos assumes a precise function. The Govonos Institute is its legal structure; the Didaskaleion constitutes its founding spirit, where the discipline takes shape; the Acta Tank ensures its operational function, by quickly testing hypotheses, producing initial evidence, and giving substance to emerging standards intended to nourish academic research.

Our vocation is not to replace universities or reproduce their structure, but to work upstream: where ideas are still in draft form, where hypotheses require immediate testing, and where initial feasibility demonstrations pave the way for more in-depth work. Govonos acts as a center of intellectual impetus, a space for ethical and conceptual engineering, independent in its method but oriented toward research.

By assuming this role, Govonos accompanies the birth of a new discipline, clarifies its foundations, tests its structuring intuitions, and makes available an initial corpus of work, standards, and evidence for academic circles. It is in this original space — flexible, demanding, and intended to nourish institutions — that we prepare the foundations of universal measurable governance.