Pattern library

Frameworks for designing accountable systems.

Patterns translate Ethotechnics engagements into reusable approaches that help you share responsibility, rehearse care, and sustain the people doing the work.

Spot friction faster, redistribute upkeep, and keep pause points ready before harm spreads.

Field-tested playbooks for high-stakes decisions.
Co-designed rituals that keep care distributed across teams.
Policy scaffolds that protect time for maintenance and repair.

Each pattern pairs narrative context with facilitation steps so teams can practice accountability before crisis hits.

resilience radar maintenance briefings care retrospectives
Quick start

Jump into patterns curated for your role.

Choose a persona to get the most relevant Ethotechnics patterns, spotlights, and capability specs without having to scan the full library.

Designers

Design services with built-in safeguards, pause points, and reversals.

Ethicists

Audit readiness with visible refusal, contestation, and care signals.

Researchers

Trace evidence behind each pattern and jump into deeper context.

Organizers

Equip coalitions to share maintenance and protect collective capacity.

Start with these

Patterns woven from multi-disciplinary engagements.

Adapt these to your own context or work with us to tailor the cadence, rituals, and safeguards. Each one emerged from real collaborations across care-critical systems.

Maintenance-as-strategy

Rotate upkeep across teams to surface issues early.

Share facilitation scripts and a cadence that keeps maintenance distributed before stress builds.

See components and testimonial
  • 4 staggered maintenance rituals with facilitation guides
  • 2 hrs of protected review time each week
  • Shared dashboard for tracking repair follow-through
“Redistributing upkeep was the only way to keep us from burning out. The pattern gave us scripts and checkpoints to make it stick.” — Systems engineer, public health lab

Consentful deployment

Pause launches until accountability conditions are in place.

Use refusal criteria and escalation playbooks to slow releases until safety, consent, and repair are accounted for.

See components and testimonial
  • 6 readiness questions that include refusal criteria
  • 3 escalation paths for harm review
  • Shared agreements for ongoing monitoring and repair
“This gave us language and leverage to say not yet—and the roadmap to get to yes without sacrificing care.” — Responsible AI steward

Care escalation

Respond to burnout signals before people disappear.

Normalize listening labs and protected respite so teams can surface stress early and document responses.

See components and testimonial
  • Quarterly listening labs feeding into leadership reviews
  • Shared respite budget held outside project teams
  • 1 public accountability statement renewed each cycle
“We stopped waiting for emergencies. The pattern made care escalations normal and documented.” — Mutual aid coordinator
Pattern spotlight

Collective repair forum for co-creating accountable safeguards.

Pair a lightweight contribution portal with facilitation scripts that keep responsibility visible from the first suggestion through the safeguard taking effect. This pattern tunes the experience to each participant, surfaces dissent before it festers, and keeps the cadence grounded in real-world repair work.

Entry survey and role map

Launch the forum with an entry survey that captures participant roles, stakes, and maintenance history. Responses auto-populate a shared role map so moderators can tailor prompts, highlight impacted communities, and match facilitators to the right rounds of review. Stakeholders receive personalized onboarding briefs that reflect their obligations, decision rights, and repair commitments.

Stage-by-stage collaboration

  1. Proposal drafting: Templates guide authors to map risks, care dependencies, and rollback plans before the forum opens.
  2. Deliberation: Moderated prompts pull in the right roles for each question and suggest relevant field notes, tooling, or agreements based on the entry survey.
  3. Voting & consensus: Weighted votes reflect the responsibility map. Minority stakeholders can attach statements that stay visible alongside the decision log.
  4. Patch deployment: Facilitators generate a hand-off brief for operations, listing required maintenance rituals, exit ramps, and contact protocols gathered through the earlier stages.

Dissent, escalation, and maintenance rituals

Built-in mechanics surface dissent without retaliation: contributors can file minority reports, trigger pause votes, or escalate to a stewardship council when obligations are breached. Every adopted patch includes a maintenance rehearsal schedule, shared checklists, and quarterly reflection prompts so the forum keeps owning repair work after launch.

Accountability analytics

Dashboards show how responsibility and decision ownership shift over successive rounds. Track which roles authored proposals, who carried deliberation labor, where vetoes originated, and how deployment duties redistribute as the system matures. Export snapshots to feed governance reviews or public transparency reports.

Facilitation kits and real-world repair invites

Moderators can download facilitation guides for each stage as PDF or editable agendas, bundle them into onboarding packets, and trigger calendar invites for live repair sessions with Ethotechnics. Every invite includes prep questions, stakeholder roles, and follow-up commitments so the forum stays linked to embodied maintenance practice.

Anchored in practice

Every pattern carries these commitments.

  • Ethics as infrastructure

    Create visibility into harm, pause when needed, share burdens fairly, and make repair accountable.

  • Maintenance as a political act

    Systems always need upkeep. We make clear who is being asked to hold it together and redesign the load.

  • Shared responsibility

    Move away from heroics by building practices and policies that let teams carry care together.

Pattern library overview

Codify Ethotechnics as reusable standards.

Ethotechnics patterns translate frontline experience into repeatable structures you can adapt across teams. Each pattern includes guidance for rehearsing maintenance, distributing responsibility, and measuring how care shows up in practice.

  • Shared vocabulary: Align teams on what accountable systems require before work begins.
  • Measurable signals: Track when safeguards are slipping and where to intervene.
  • Scalable rituals: Grow care without losing context by pairing policy with practice.

Find the pattern that fits your system.

Browse the domains we cover and jump straight to the capability specs that match the work you're doing. These filters update the capability list below without a page refresh, and every capability link still works as an anchor if JavaScript is unavailable.

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How filters work

Select a capability to jump down the page and highlight matching specs. Layer on a domain to narrow the list to the contexts we explicitly cover. If scripting is blocked, every link still acts as an anchor so you can keep exploring manually.

Capability specs

Design standards for accountable capabilities.

Each capability anchors a cluster of patterns. Use these specs as checklists when designing, auditing, or iterating on services that must remain stoppable, reversible, fair, contestable, and explainable.

Stopability

Ensure systems can be paused quickly before harm compounds.

Anti-patterns
Release plans without kill-switch owners, or alerts that notify without authority to stop.
Design checklist
Document stop scenarios, assign empowered stewards, and rehearse shutdown drills across domains and time zones.
Metrics to track
Time-to-stop, number of rehearsed scenarios per quarter, and frequency of deferred stop requests.

Reversibility

Make it possible to undo decisions and repair records without friction.

Anti-patterns
Immutable pipelines without rollback pathways or archives that overwrite histories.
Design checklist
Version critical decisions, log rationale, and set SLAs for reversal requests with cross-functional review.
Metrics to track
Reversibility percentage, average restoration time, and number of blocked reversals per cycle.

Fair Burden

Distribute maintenance and compliance work away from already burdened people.

Anti-patterns
Expecting impacted communities to self-advocate without pay or holding marginalized staff as default monitors.
Design checklist
Map who carries upkeep today, budget for redistribution, and rotate stewardship with compensation and respite.
Metrics to track
Burden distribution indicators, time protected for care work, and stipend utilization rates.
Case examples
Care escalation rituals

Contestability

Give people real channels to question, appeal, and renegotiate decisions.

Anti-patterns
Appeal paths that dead-end in support queues or require insider knowledge to access.
Design checklist
Publish appeal maps, guarantee human review checkpoints, and monitor backlog transparency with regular audits.
Metrics to track
Appeal success rate, appeal latency, and percent of cases with documented resolution.

Explainability for Accountability

Ensure decisions can be traced, justified, and audited by those impacted.

Anti-patterns
Opaque dashboards, black-box vendor models, or documentation that never leaves engineering wikis.
Design checklist
Co-create plain language disclosures, link model changes to accountability logs, and pair every explanation with a clear escalation contact.
Metrics to track
Documentation freshness, percent of decisions with shareable rationale, and audience comprehension surveys.
Scenario lab

Explore a resilience monitoring rehearsal.

Use this blueprint to host practice sessions where teams learn to notice strain early, surface maintenance debt, and adjust shared agreements as conditions shift.

Map shared rehearsal scenarios

Start with situations that mirror the services you steward. Each scenario should include recent incidents, maintenance history, and frontline perspectives so the practice stays grounded in lived experience.

  • Supply chain continuity: Note supplier capacity, inspection hold queues, and when to call in mutual aid as distribution falters.
  • Civic service intake: Walk through benefit eligibility reviews, appeal outcomes, and care escalation wait times for public assistance portals.
  • Clinical coordination: Pair patient routing decisions with downtime logs, consent tracking, and on-call rotation health indicators.

Practice recalibrating safeguards together

Try different ways of sharing load so the team can see how backup support, feedback cadence, and detection speed shift risk for the people relying on your service.

  • Set aside backup support: Allocate standby capacity and caretaker rotations, then note how responsibilities shift when stress events occur.
  • Shorten or stretch reflection time: Adjust retrospective cadences to experience how quickly field reports inform leadership actions.
  • Schedule detection drills: Decide on alert thresholds and rehearsal frequency to understand how long it takes to notice drift in each scenario.

Visualize operating states with care cues

Ground every state transition in maintenance language so teams know when to pause, repair, or escalate.

  • Calm state overlays show throughput stability, equitable workload, and aligned stewardship commitments.
  • Warning bands pulse when redundancy margins shrink, backlog ages, or unresolved feedback loops pile up.
  • Failure mode panels move the team into pause posture with annotated repair tasks and people impacted.
System SLIs for justice

Service-level indicators to monitor accountability.

Pair qualitative rituals with quantitative guardrails. These SLIs keep teams honest about whether the system still respects the people who depend on it.

Time-to-stop

Measure the elapsed time between a stop trigger and the actual halt of the system or feature.

  • Target: < 30 minutes for high-risk operations
  • Monitored by: Incident command and accountable executives
  • Escalate when: Median exceeds threshold across two consecutive review cycles

Reversibility percentage

Track the share of decisions or transactions that can be fully reversed without manual workarounds.

  • Target: ≥ 90% of reversible cases completed within SLA
  • Monitored by: Data governance & operations teams
  • Escalate when: Exceptions backlog grows week over week

Appeal success rate

Understand whether contestation pathways meaningfully change outcomes for impacted people.

  • Target: Documented resolution in ≥ 60% of appeals
  • Monitored by: Ombuds, compliance, and community councils
  • Escalate when: Success rate drops or appeal volume spikes unexpectedly

Appeal latency

Track the average duration between appeal submission and initial human response.

  • Target: Initial response within 5 business days
  • Monitored by: Support operations
  • Escalate when: 95th percentile exceeds two-week mark

Burden distribution indicators

Monitor who shoulders maintenance, escalation, and emotional labor across the service.

  • Target: No single role holds > 30% of total maintenance hours
  • Monitored by: People operations and stewardship councils
  • Escalate when: Marginalized teams carry disproportionate on-call or repair work
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