PRE-HISTORY

Agora's initial rules [1] omitted Suber's concept of players acting in
groups, but the concept was re-introduced within a few months by Deb
and Bob, who effectively acted as a single player. [2] [3]

The rules were soon amended to define Groups (for exercising joint
influence over the game in general), Contests (for awarding Points
toward a win), and Contracts (for enforcing agreements).  These were
generalized into Organizations, leading to 1995's Mousetrap [4] which
attempted to place obligations on players against their will; the rules
were amended to prevent this, and the issue has not significantly
arisen since.  Organizations were replaced with Subordinate Legal
Contracts, but the specific sub-types remained largely the same
(Contracts were apparently renamed to Agreements at some point).

Recursiveness and non-disclosure were explored by 2001's UNDEAD Group,
which responded to forced non-disclosure by automatically copying its
private text to a new agreement and then amending itself to do little
besides refer to the new agreement, thus obeying the letter of the
requirement while violating the spirit.

Groups were replaced with mostly-random Teams (with Team wins triggering
a pair of trades) during 2003 and 2004, while Contests waxed and waned
depending on whether Points were currently in political favor.

LONG-TERM

Pineapple Partnership
---------------------

In February, CFJs 1613 through 1616 questioned whether non-human
entities (e.g. pineapples, avocados, as well as humans claiming to be
avocados or blobs or what have you) were recognized as persons.  Shortly
afterward, the Pineapple Partnership [5] (Goethe and Zefram, the callers
of these CFJs) registered as a player, formally establishing the concept
that legal persons backed by agreements might be able to do so.  Its
control mechanism (either partner could control the partnership with the
other's support, or without eir objection within one day) became a
common template.

Goethe was replaced by Eris in May, testing the continuity of
partnerships through changes in membership, as well as the ramifications
of failing to disclose the details of such changes.

Pineapple became de facto inactive in August, and de jure in October.

Human Point Two
---------------

Human Point Two (Murphy and Quazie, later OscarMeyr) registered in
April, copying (with credit) Pineapple's control mechanism.  It became
de facto inactive in September when Murphy left, and de jure in October.

Primo Corporation
-----------------

Primo Corporation [6] registered in May, using a fundamentally different
control mechanism:  only CEO BobTHJ could directly control it, but
the agreement functioned as an active sub-nomic (with each shareholder
having a number of votes equal to eir shares) and partly directing the
CEO's actions.

Primo was the first partnership to have another partnership as a member,
as well as the first partnership to attempt to participate in another
nomic; in June, it attempted to register as a player of B Nomic,
prompting B to define factions as repositories of voting clout but not
persons. [7]

Primo became de facto inactive in July, and was dissolved by Issue
(internal proposal) 26 in October.  This tested the clause requiring
unanimous partner agreement, as one of the partners voted against the
dissolution (but was decided to have agreed in the larger sense to
Primo's charter allowing simple majority approval).

Association of Federated Organizations
--------------------------------------

The Association of Federated Organizations (comex, Levi, and Murphy;
later pikhq) registered in September, allowing any member to control it
without prior consultation.  In practice, even the short one-day wait
used by Pineapple and its imitators led to relatively low activity, as
each partner had to keep track of eir own intent on an ongoing basis
every time e wanted to make the partnership do something; by eliminating
this, the AFO became more agile, while still retaining some ability for
partners to overrule one another (e.g. by retracting votes or, more
recently, CFJs).

During Murphy's brief deregistration, the AFO was the first partnership
with a non-player member (previously attempted by Bob's Quality Cards,
see below; Primo narrowly missed it with bd_, who was introduced via
B Nomic, but registered in Agora before becoming a shareholder).

The AFO has attempted multiple contest scams involving subsidiary
partnerships, and was used to scam a bug in the Marks rule and mint the
equivalent of over 100 Blue Voting Credits (though this scam could have
been executed just as easily without it).  This prompted a proposal to
repeal partnerships, which is losing in the polls as of this writing.

The AFO also claimed to register as a player of B Nomic, prompting a
re-examination of the player and faction rules adopted in response to
Primo's previous attempt. [8]

Fookiemyartug
-------------

Fookiemyartug, fronted by BobTHJ on behalf of an undisclosed set of
non-players, registered in October.  This was questioned in CFJ 1779,
which was judged TRUE on the basis of BobTHJ's explicit testimony that
it was indeed a person, and for lack of evidence to the contrary.

SHORT-TERM

Second-System Effect (Eris and Murphy) registered in May to explore the
ramifications of an anonymous partner (Eris had planned to publish
messages from a second address for the purpose), but soon dissolved
after Pineapple beat them to the punch with the Goethe/Eris swap.

Human Point Three through Human Point Fourteen came and went in May,
effectively minting voters for a scam proposal to give Human Point Two
a win.  Yin Corp and Yan Corp (Quazie and Zefram) came and went later
in the month, further exploring the potential paradoxes of recursive
memberships.

The Hanging Judge (comex and Zefram) registered in May to work around
a bug in the judicial rules, which left all other players ineligible
to be assigned as judges.  It deregistered in June after the bug was
fixed.

The Host (Levi and Murphy) came and went in August, effectively minting
contestmasters to give Levi a scam win on points.

UNSUCCESSFUL

root attempted to register square root (a partnership of one player,
emself, acting as a corporation sole); this was quickly followed by
Zefram attempting to register Nemo (a partnership of zero players,
acting as a soulless corporation).  CFJs 1682 and 1683 held that
agreements must be made among two or more players.

BobTHJ attempted to register Bob's Quality Cards (a Colorado partnership
with John Chapman) and Gunner Nomic 2.0 in June.  CFJ 1687 held that
Colorado law was incompatible with the Agoran rules, and CFJ 1696 held
that Gunner Nomic 2.0 was never a partnership because it was never
intended to be governed by Agora.

AMBIGUOUSLY SUCCESSFUL

comex claimed to register Big Brother in September; this was questioned
in CFJ 1744, which was judged UNDETERMINED for lack of evidence.  Its
only purported action to date is an election vote.

GENERAL OBSERVATIONS

The obvious risk of partnerships is much the same as that of real-life
corporate politics, namely that the democracy/meritocracy can be
subverted by partners creating and manipulating additional legal
persons.  In contrast, recruiting and directing an equal number of
human confederates is relatively difficult in practice.  This has led
to partnerships being defined as non-first-class (limiting their ability
to vote and judge), and with their underlying basis of first-class
persons subject to examination (allowing redundant partnerships to be
forcibly deregistered).

In theory, partnerships are based on the Contracts/Agreements
rules.  In practice, they usually impose only a general obligation to
ensure that the partnership's obligations are satisfied (a condition
of being a partnership), and their role is otherwise closer to that of
Groups/Teams (to give their members additional powers).  Agreements to
perform specific actions are often informal, often obeyed, and thus not
often required to be examined in public at all, much less become
partnerships; the rare exceptions to this trend include CFJ 1325 (in
which Lindrum deregistered before fulfilling some obligations), and
some low-stakes cases deliberately created by Murphy and the other AFO
partners to test the new equity court.

REFERENCES

[1] http://www.fysh.org/~zefram/agora/chuck0_nr_19930630.txt
[2]
http://www.mail-archive.com/agora-discussion@agoranomic.org/msg01521.html
[3]
ftp://ftp.cse.unsw.edu.au/pub/users/malcolmr/nomic/articles/agora-theses/lib-vlad2.html
[4] http://www.nomic.net/~nomicwiki/index.php/MousetrapThesis
[5] http://www.nomic.net/~nomicwiki/index.php/PineapplePartnership
[6] http://groups.google.com/group/primo-corporation
[7]
http://lists.ellipsis.cx/archives/spoon-business/spoon-business-200706/msg00071.html
[8]
http://lists.ellipsis.cx/archives/spoon-business/spoon-business-200711/msg00142.html
