TIME Profile: Application to the Ward 2 Development Forum

A companion to the wiki brief A TIME Profile for Multi-Perspective Governance, applying its findings to the Ward 2 Business and Community Development Forum (W2DF) in Theewaterskloof Municipality. The wiki brief concludes that no validated TIME profile exists and that the credible first step is an unscored card sort. This page sets out what that step would look like in the Valley of Grace, what South African law requires if the forum later wants a scored instrument, and what the valley’s history asks of anyone who brings a sorting tool into it.

The recommendation is to offer the forum an unscored pilot and let the forum decide. A scored, named profile is not recommended at this stage.

TL;DR

• W2DF is an E-form table. It is run by the community, treats the valley as one area and has no single sector in charge. Its first meeting drew twelve people from municipal and provincial government, farming, tourism, heritage and civic bodies. This is the setting the wiki brief describes, where no form supplies a tie-breaker.
• Pilot: propose the idea at the November 2026 meeting. If the forum agrees, co-design the statements with a Genadendal reference group and the Transformasie Komitee, then run an anonymous Q-sort and issue-by-issue self-placement at a later meeting. The forum’s own five priorities serve as the domains. No individual scores and no stored profiles. Estimated cost R80,000 to R200,000.
• Law: a named, scored TIME profile would probably count as special personal information under POPIA, and an instrument that measured a psychological construct would need HPCSA classification. An anonymous Q-sort avoids most of these obligations.
• History: in a valley shaped by a mission settlement, apartheid-era rural areas legislation and a land transfer still pending after 27 years, a tool that sorts residents into four labeled groups risks being read as a new classification scheme. A local reference group should review anything before it is used.

The forum as an E-form table

The minutes of the inaugural meeting on 16 September 2026 record that the forum is run by the community, with Theewaterskloof Municipality giving administrative support at first. It works at ward level across Genadendal, Greyton, Bereaville, Voorstekraal, Boschmanskloof and the surrounding farms, and it agreed five development priorities: tourism development; education and skills; agriculture and food sovereignty; conservation and environment; and business development and local procurement. The Transformasie Komitee takes part as a stakeholder, and its 8-sector plan is to be considered alongside the forum’s priorities.

Two decisions from that meeting read clearly through the ladder of inference, lens and self-talk model in the wiki brief:

• “From the start.” Participants from Genadendal asked that affected communities be involved from the start of a proposal, and not only after it has been written. A finished proposal arrives at the conclusion rung of the ladder, with its data already selected and its meaning already assigned through someone else’s lens. The request is to be present on the lower rungs, where the data is chosen and given meaning. It also works as a structural defense against reactive devaluation: a proposal co-authored across lenses has no single “other side” to discount.
• TRANCRAA routed elsewhere. The forum chose to avoid duplicating the platforms already handling the Farm 39 transfer and to take practical planning matters to municipal officials. Land is where the valley’s lenses sit furthest apart and where self-talk carries the most history (see TRANCRAA). A new forum has no shared data and no trust on that question yet, so the routing decision protects the forum while those are built.

The people at the table speak from recognizable settings: municipal and provincial officials from office (I), commercial farmers and guesthouse owners from business (M), the museum, the Komitee and church-linked bodies from heritage and belonging (T), and conservation and networking groups from cross-boundary collaboration (E). This describes settings, never persons. Every participant holds several forms, and the same farmer may speak from T at church and from M at the farmers’ association. The profile’s job is to make that mix visible.

Domains for this forum

The wiki brief recommends a domain-by-form profile, with domains chosen by the group. The forum’s five priorities are the natural domains. The table shows where each form is likely to surface; it is illustrative, and the forum would set its own list.

Domain	T	I	M	E
Tourism development	Heritage and family ties to place; weddings and events in Genadendal	Transport permits; the missing tourism office	Guesthouses, operators, pricing	A single whole-valley destination
Education and skills	Families and churches placing young people	Elsenburg NQF qualifications; SETA funding	The skills employers say they need	Mentorship between commercial and emerging farmers
Agriculture and food sovereignty	Community gardens; leiwater turns	Water licensing	Market-linked farming	Shared use of fallow land
Conservation and environment	Stewardship of family and mission land	Protected-area rules	Alien-clearing contracts	The Overberg leopard corridor
Business and local procurement	Buying from people you know	Municipal procurement rules	Supply chains and competition	Keeping money circulating in the ward

Water deserves its own row if the forum wants one. The leiwater system, in which each property holds a timed turn (beurt) on a shared furrow over a weekly cycle, is equality matching inside a T-form community. The same water is also a licensed allocation under the National Water Act and a priced input. The wiki brief flags equality matching as one of the places where TIME’s categories are still unsettled.

The Komitee’s 8-sector plan offers a second candidate domain list. Using it would apply the “from the start” principle to the tool itself.

Recommended pilot

1. November 2026 meeting. A short item proposing the pilot. The forum decides whether to go ahead. If it does, it names a small reference group from Genadendal and Greyton, including the Komitee, to co-design the statements.
2. Build the statement set. Gather 36 to 48 statements from the minutes, from short interviews and from local sources, in English and Afrikaans, adding isiXhosa where participants need it. The reference group reviews them for tone, fairness and anything that reads as classification.
3. Run the sort at a following meeting. Participants sort the statements on one priority item before and after the deliberation on it. Sorting is anonymous and can be done orally or with picture cards. An analyst outside the forum runs a by-person factor analysis and reports shared viewpoints with no names attached.
4. Issue-by-issue self-placement. On each substantive agenda item, participants privately mark which form they think should govern it. Only the aggregate is shown.
5. Acknowledgment round. Before a contested decision, each speaker names the strongest point they heard from another form’s logic. Sherman, Nelson and Ross (2003) found that this reduces false polarization; explaining one’s own position again does not.

The forum then decides whether the exercise was worth repeating, and whether it wants anything more.

South African legal checklist

This is the author’s reading of the statutes and should be confirmed with counsel before any data is collected.

POPIA

• A TIME profile linked to a named person is personal information: the Act’s definition covers a person’s views, opinions and preferences.
• Section 26 prohibits processing special personal information, which includes religious or philosophical beliefs, race or ethnic origin and political persuasion, except as section 27 allows. A profile asking how public office, church land or municipal authority should be governed plausibly reveals philosophical beliefs and political persuasion. T-form items on lineage and belonging may reveal ethnic origin in a valley where identity maps onto apartheid classification. The conservative reading is to treat a named, scored profile as special personal information.
• Sections 28 (religious or philosophical beliefs), 29 (race or ethnic origin) and 31 (political persuasion) add conditions specific to each category. The Information Regulator’s Guidance Note on Processing of Special Personal Information (June 2021) covers when authorization is needed under section 27(2).
• If any named data is collected: explicit consent; a purpose limited to facilitation, with no reuse for planning, funding or research without fresh consent; deletion of individual responses once the aggregate exists; security safeguards under section 19; and a plain-language notice at collection in each working language.
• The anonymous Q-sort in the pilot collects no names, which avoids most of these obligations.

Employment Equity Act, section 8

Section 8 governs psychological testing of employees by employers. It applies only if Theewaterskloof Municipality or another employer used the tool on its own staff. Tests used in that setting must be scientifically valid and reliable, applied fairly and free of bias. The amendments in the Employment Equity Amendment Act 4 of 2022 took effect on 1 January 2025. A voluntary community forum falls outside section 8.

Health Professions Act and HPCSA classification

The Health Professions Act 56 of 1974 reserves psychological acts, including the use of instruments that assess personality, to registered practitioners, and the HPCSA classifies tests that measure a psychological construct. A statement sort about the forum’s own issues is unlikely to count as a psychological test (inference). A scored TIME instrument sits closer to the line. Framing it as a measure of views on governance, and showing a low correlation with Big Five traits, strengthens the case that it falls outside the reservation. Seek an HPCSA classification opinion before any scored rollout.

Language and cultural validity

• Build from local speech. The South African Personality Inventory was developed from interviews in all 11 official languages and replicated across the country’s main ethnocultural groups (Fetvadjiev et al. 2015). A TIME instrument for the valley should start the same way: from how people in Genadendal and Greyton talk about belonging, authority, trade and working together.
• Imported scales can fail. The cultural cognition individualism-communitarianism scale drops below 0.6 reliability in collectivist settings, against about 0.8 in Britain and the United States (Guo, Muhetaer and Hu 2023). A scale that holds together among Greyton landowners may not hold together in Genadendal.
• Invariance before comparison. Comparing scores across English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa respondents requires configural, metric and scalar invariance testing. Without it, differences between groups may come from translation.
• Literacy. Q-sorts work orally and with pictures. Likert and scenario items need cognitive interviews at a range of literacy levels.

History

Genadendal began as a Moravian mission in the 1730s. Its land was granted in trust in 1858, converted into a statutory reserve in 1909, and brought under the Rural Areas Act of 1987, the apartheid-era statute for coloured rural areas. Twenty-seven years after TRANCRAA came into force, the transfer of Farm 39 has not happened. Promises to the Valley of Grace traces four promise cycles in which the community ended each cycle with less scope than it began with.

Two consequences for any profiling tool:

• Classification. A tool that sorts residents into four labeled groups can be read as one more classification scheme, especially if T items touch lineage and identity. The domain-by-form design, voluntary participation, aggregate-only display and review by a local reference group are the main mitigations.
• The missing lens. Participants who read the forum through that history may hold a lens TIME has no name for. Grid-group cultural theory calls it fatalist: bound by rules one had no part in making, and outside the groups that make them. The pilot’s statement set should include this position so that it registers as a lens. Without it, those participants would look like low scorers on every form.

Phased plan

These figures are the author’s estimates from common psychometric practice. Check them with a South African psychometrician before budgeting. Phases 2 to 4 happen only if the forum asks for a scored instrument.

Phase	Goal	Sample	Time	Expertise	Rough cost (ZAR)
0. Construct definition	Define T, I, M and E at the level of a person in a domain; agree the domain list with the forum	n/a	1 to 2 months	Lead author; one academic advisor	20,000 to 50,000
1. Unscored Q-sort pilot	Make lenses visible without scoring anyone	20 to 40	3 to 4 months	Q-method analyst; community translators; facilitator	60,000 to 150,000
2. Item generation and review	Draft domain-by-form items	6 to 10 experts; 15 to 30 cognitive interviews per language	4 to 6 months	Psychometrician; translators; HPCSA-registered psychologist as advisor	150,000 to 350,000
3. Minimal credible version	Items hang together and are stable	250 to 400; 60 to 100 retest	6 to 9 months	Psychometrician with factor-analysis skills	300,000 to 600,000
4. Fully validated version	Fair comparison across languages; prediction of meeting behavior	200+ per language group	18 to 30 months	Psychometrics team; discourse coders; ethics and legal review	1.5 million to 3 million

Safeguards specific to this forum

• Custody. The convener tables proposals to the forum, including the Tourism Growth Fund concept. The analysis, and any data, should sit with a party that has no stake in land, funding or municipal decisions.
• Komitee review. Statement sets and any reports go through the same Komitee review the W2DF register already uses.
• Elections. Avoid collecting belief-related data in the run-up to the 2026/27 local government elections, when inferences about political persuasion are most sensitive.
• No other-labeling. Forms describe arguments and domains, never persons. This is a ground rule for every meeting where the pilot runs.
• Refusal is free. Anyone can take full part in the forum without taking part in the pilot.

Open questions

• Does the forum want this at all, or would acknowledgment rounds and the “from the start” principle do the work on their own?
• Who is the independent custodian and analyst?
• Which languages does the statement set need for the people who actually attend?
• Should the domains follow the forum’s five priorities or the Komitee’s 8-sector plan?
• How should the pilot represent people who stay away from the forum, whose lens may be the one most worth hearing?

Related pages

• A TIME Profile for Multi-Perspective Governance (the general brief, with the full annotated reference list)
• Promises to the Valley of Grace
• TRANCRAA
• Coordination Surface
• Ward 2 Development Forum register
• BioConomy Wiki: The TIME Framework

Sources

• Haupt, M. (2026). “A TIME Profile for Multi-Perspective Governance.” BioConomy Wiki. https://wiki.bioconomy.earth/research/time-profile. The general brief this page applies; holds the full literature review and references.
• Ward 2 Business and Community Development Forum. (2026). Minutes of the inaugural meeting, 16 September 2026, Genadendal. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tKMUdwSYZZpDZyhp8Cz-YWirFEVM5Fv3/view. The official record of the forum’s priorities, working principles and the “from the start” agreement.
• Haupt, M. (2026, August). “Sawalmem: Watershed Governance.” Framer OS. https://frameros.substack.com/p/watershed-governance. Reads the valley’s water through the four TIME forms, including the leiwater turn system.
• Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013, sections 1, 19 and 26 to 31. The definitions of personal and special personal information and the conditions for processing them.
• Information Regulator (South Africa). (2021, June). Guidance Note on Processing of Special Personal Information. https://inforegulator.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Guidance-Note-Processing-Special-PersonalInformation-20210628-004.pdf. When authorization under section 27(2) is required.
• Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998, section 8, as amended by the Employment Equity Amendment Act 4 of 2022 (in force 1 January 2025). Governs psychological testing of employees; relevant only if an employer uses the tool.
• Health Professions Act 56 of 1974, section 37. Reserves psychological acts to registered practitioners; the basis for HPCSA test classification.
• Association of Test Publishers of South Africa. “SA Legislation.” https://www.assa.co.za/sa-legislation/. Practitioner summary of how section 8 and HPCSA classification now interact.
• Fetvadjiev, V. H., Meiring, D., van de Vijver, F. J. R., Nel, J. A., and Hill, C. (2015). “The South African Personality Inventory (SAPI): A culture-informed instrument for the country’s main ethnocultural groups.” Psychological Assessment, 27(3), 827-837. https://doi.org/10.1037/pas0000078. The local model for building items from speech in several languages.
• Guo, Q., Muhetaer, P., and Hu, P. (2023). “Cultural worldviews and support for governmental management of COVID-19.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 10, 879. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02339-w. Evidence that imported worldview scales lose reliability outside the settings they were built in.
• Sherman, D. K., Nelson, L. D., and Ross, L. D. (2003). “Naive realism and affirmative action: Adversaries are more similar than they think.” Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 25(4), 275-289. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15324834BASP2504_2. The basis for acknowledgment rounds.
• Niemeyer, S., and Dryzek, J. S. (2007). “The ends of deliberation: Meta-consensus and inter-subjective rationality as ideal outcomes.” Swiss Political Science Review, 13(4), 497-526. The case for measuring shared viewpoints with Q-methodology.
• Watts, S., and Stenner, P. (2012). Doing Q Methodological Research: Theory, Method and Interpretation. Sage. The practical manual for running the pilot.
• Lewis, M., with Woodhull, J. (2008). Inside the No: Five Steps to Decisions That Last. The Lewis Method of Deep Democracy, developed in South Africa; surfaces minority positions without typing people.

Provenance

Written 26 September 2026 as the Valley of Grace application of the wiki brief A TIME Profile for Multi-Perspective Governance. Forum details come from the W2DF inaugural minutes and register. Historical details come from the TRANCRAA and Promises to the Valley of Grace pages. The legal readings are the author’s and have not been tested with the Information Regulator or the HPCSA. Cost and sample figures are estimates. The assignment of forum settings to TIME forms is illustrative and describes the settings people speak from; it does not classify any participant.