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Modular Politics: Toward a Governance Layer for Online Communities

Governance in online communities is an increasingly high-stakes challenge, and yet many basic features of offline governance legacies--juries, political parties, term limits, and formal debates, to name a few--are not in the feature-sets of the software most community platforms use. Drawing on the paradigm of Institutional Analysis and Development, this paper proposes a strategy for addressing this lapse by specifying basic features of a generalizable paradigm for online governance called Modular Politics. Whereas classical governance typologies tend to present a choice among wholesale ideologies, such as democracy or oligarchy, Modular Politics would enable platform operators and their users to build bottom-up governance processes from computational components that are modular and composable, highly versatile in their expressiveness, portable from one context to another, and interoperable across platforms. This kind of approach could implement pre-digital governance systems as well as accelerate innovation in uniquely digital techniques. As diverse communities share and connect their components and data, governance could occur through a ubiquitous network layer. To that end, this paper proposes the development of an open standard for networked governance.

The Yak Online Governance Primer :: The Yak Collective

How do you do online governance? This primer is intended as a guided tour through a curated set of readings — based on a year of study by the Yak Collective1 — that can help groups and organizations navigate this question.

Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media

Decentralizing the governance of social computing systems to communities promises to empower them to make independent decisions, with nuance and in accordance with their values. Yet, communities do not govern in isolation. Many problems communities face are common, or move across their boundaries. We therefore propose designing for "inter-community governance:" mechanisms that support relationships and interactions between communities to coordinate on governance issues. Drawing from workshops with 24 individuals on decentralized, community-run social media, we present six challenges in designing for inter-community governance surfaced through ideas proposed in workshops. Together, these ideas come together as an ecosystem of resources, infrastructures, and tools that highlight three key principles for designing for inter-community governance: modularity, forkability, and polycentricity. We end with a discussion of how the ideas proposed in workshops might be implemented in future work aiming to support community governance in social computing systems broadly.

[Proposal] WG for group/community standards and infrastructure in ATProto

TLDR: I’m proposing a working group to develop shared interoperable standards for community infrastructure within ATProto. Many teams are independently making foundational design decisions about group/community membership, governance, and infrastructure. Without coordination, a de facto standard will calcify from momentum rather than deliberate evaluation of the ranges of community needs. I provide initial questions and principles to start discussion. Many people, apps and projects in developme...

Modal Collective

We do development, design, organizing, policy campaigning, and more to make computing more useful, secure, and resilient. Our work is centered around software infrastructure projects such as GNOME, postmarketOS, p2panda, systemd, and the Linux kernel.

Findings Report: Governance on Fediverse Microblogging Servers

Research report on Fediverse microblogging server governance: risks and mitigations, moderation, server leadership, federated diplomacy, and governance tooling.

Collective funding, governance and prioritization of a browser engine projects · Issue #11 · w3c/breakouts-day-2025

Session description Today, each of the three main, open source browser engine projects have a steward organization which contribute, by far, the lion's share of the project's commits - 75-9...

Embedded Governance: Control That Works by Disappearing - Astral's Blog

Account delegation for atproto: orgs, aliases, alts and more - Nel Ramblings

Bryan Newbold: Protocol engineering

A protocol engineer at the social-media platform Bluesky describes building an open protocol around a fast-growing social media platform.

Clan 2025 Wrap-Up: From Infrastructure to a New Computing Paradigm

A look back at what we built in 2025 and where Clan is heading next

Semantic governance policies overview  |  Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform  |  Google Cloud Documentation

Learn how Semantic Governance Policies (SGP) secure AI agents and tool calls using Natural Language Constraints.

The Purpose of Protocols

Every open social protocol generates shared resources, but none has produced a governance framework adequate to those resources. So who fills that vacuum?