Abstract
Digital platforms supporting collective enterprise are increasingly deployed in contexts where meaning, legitimacy, and coordination cannot be assumed to be stable. In such environments, system failure arises not primarily from incorrect data or defective processes, but from the inability to sustain and revise the interpretive conditions under which communication becomes meaningful and actionable. Prevailing approaches in information systems, while recognising the role of communication, largely presuppose these conditions rather than treating them as objects of design and governance.
This paper introduces the notion of third-order practice as the reflexive, community-level capability to regulate the conditions under which communicative action is constituted, interpreted, and revised. Building on semiotic and dialogic perspectives, and extending cybernetic notions of reflexivity, the paper distinguishes between operating within established communicative forms, working on those forms through reflection and reformulation, and the third-order means by which transitions between these modes are enabled and governed. We argue that the governability and evolvability of socio-technical systems depend on this third-order capability.
To render third-order practice operational, the paper introduces architectural discourse as a mediating domain in which the semiotic conditions of communication become expressible as designable and governable constructs. Within this framing, the Trustworthy Governable Platform (TGP) is presented as an infrastructural realisation in which roles, conversation archetypes, instances, publication, and provenance enable the explicit representation and collective regulation of communicative forms.
The paper contributes to information systems theory by reframing the discipline from a concern with information processing to the infrastructural support of institutionalised, and the ongoing, re-institutionalisation of, meaning. It further argues that the integration of artificial agents into socio-technical systems intensifies the need for third-order practice, as communities must explicitly govern the conditions under which such agents participate in meaning-making processes.
Recommended Citation
Jacucci, Gianni and Martin, Mike, "preprint OISI26 t-15 TGP4 - Third-Order Practice and the Governance of Communicative Forms: A Semiotic and Architectural Foundation for Trustworthy Governable Platforms" (2026). OISI Workshop 2026. 23.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/oisiworkshop2026/23