There is increasing agreement on the need for greater attention to the role of water rights in water resources management. This paper presents an overview of institutional options for water rights. It introduces the reasons why water rights are important and are receiving increasing attention and then presents general principles related to property rights. Various types of institutional arrangements may be used to regulate socially accepted claims to water, including community-based selfgovernance, agency administration and water markets. Methods for improving water rights and water allocation institutions include forming forums, clarifying water rights, planning and modeling techniques, and capacity building for specialized management agencies. Institutional arrangements and methods for improving water rights and allocation institutions should combine to a framework for water rights that draws optimally on the strengths of various water allocation institutions.

Prisoner's Dilemma, Chicken, Stag Hunts, and other two-person two-move (2 × 2) models of strategic situations have played a central role in the development of game theory. The Robinson-Goforth topology of payoff swaps reveals a natural order in the payoff space of 2 × 2 games, visualized in their four-layer "periodic table" format that elegantly organizes the diversity of 2 × 2 games, showing relationships and potential transformations between neighboring games. This article presents additional visualizations of the topology, and a naming system for locating all 2 × 2 games as combinations of game payoff patterns from the symmetric ordinal 2 × 2 games. The symmetric ordinal games act as coordinates locating games in maps of the payoff space of 2 × 2 games, including not only asymmetric ordinal games and the complete set of games with ties, but also ordinal and normalized equivalents of all games with ratio or real-value payoffs. An efficient nomenclature can contribute to a systematic understanding of the diversity of elementary social situations; clarify relationships between social dilemmas and other joint preference structures; identify interesting games; show potential solutions available through transforming incentives; catalog the variety of models of 2 × 2 strategic situations available for experimentation, simulation, and analysis; and facilitate cumulative and comparative research in game theory.

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The prominent role of software in nanotechnology research and development suggests that open source development methods might offer advantages in improving reliability, performance and accessibility. Open source approaches have shown new opportunities for voluntary cooperation to create and improve complex software. Suitable software licences could be used to promote access, compatibility and sharing of improvements. Many companies currently associated with nanotechnology produce materials, equipment and research and development services, all of which could support open source business models; however, no company yet emphasizes an open source strategy. Some molecular modelling software is already open source or public domain. Software for molecular engineering constitutes an important opportunity for open sourcing, especially if systems architectures encouraging collaboration can be further developed. Analysis suggests that the net impact of open sourcing would be to enhance safety. Initiatives for open sourcing of molecular nanotechnology could be strengthened by coalition building, and appropriate strategies for open source licensing of copyrights and patents.Prepared for the Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology, Bethesda, MD, USA, 3-5 November 2000.