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.
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 (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 [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).
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] http://www.fysh.org/~zefram/agora/chuck0_nr_19930630.txt [2] http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/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