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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.

NETmundial Multistakeholder Statement | Net Mundial

Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance

[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.

"Okay, I've Actually Softened My Take on This": How People in Decentralized Social Media Reason about the Appropriateness of Generative AI

Generative AI (GenAI) is increasingly integrated into social media, raising questions about whether, where, and how it belongs. In decentralized social media (DSM), these decisions are distributed across users, developers, moderators, and administrators, making GenAI a collective governance challenge. At the same time, public discourse often flattens arguments to broad pro- or anti-AI positions that offer little insight into what people actually find (in)appropriate and why. Through 20 semi-structured interviews with people from Mastodon and Bluesky, structured around seven GenAI scenarios, we examine how people reason about GenAI's appropriateness in DSM. We find that participants drew conditional boundaries around particular GenAI configurations through distinct, salient, and weighted considerations spanning technology, integration, and use. We conceptualize this as boundary drawing and show how making such boundaries visible can support more grounded design, policy, and collective deliberation around GenAI in DSM.

"Okay, I've Actually Softened My Take on This": How People in Decentralized Social Media Reason about the Appropriateness of Generative AI

Generative AI (GenAI) is increasingly integrated into social media, raising questions about whether, where, and how it belongs. In decentralized social media (DSM), these decisions are distributed across users, developers, moderators, and administrators, making GenAI a collective governance challenge. At the same time, public discourse often flattens arguments to broad pro- or anti-AI positions that offer little insight into what people actually find (in)appropriate and why. Through 20 semi-structured interviews with people from Mastodon and Bluesky, structured around seven GenAI scenarios, we examine how people reason about GenAI's appropriateness in DSM. We find that participants drew conditional boundaries around particular GenAI configurations through distinct, salient, and weighted considerations spanning technology, integration, and use. We conceptualize this as boundary drawing and show how making such boundaries visible can support more grounded design, policy, and collective deliberation around GenAI in DSM.

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.

Contributions and the Latest Generation

Simon Phipps wrote a particularly interesting article on project governance in the “GITHUB generation.”  The article is very good reading, and thought-provoking. In it, he articulates, …

Just Enough Governance: Introducing Steward Governance for DASL

When we started working on DASL, it was little more than an experiment. We talked to as many people as we could who had been interested in content addressing but couldn't make it work for their needs. The result was radically focused on interoperability and adoption, on a mission

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

DASL: Governance of the DASL Project

The goal of the DASL Project is to develop content-addressing primitives and the technologies that build on them, with a view towards enabling unbundled software and protocol architectures that best align with and promote democratic systems.

Generative AI and the Digital Commons — The Collective Intelligence Project

The aim of this paper is to build models of governance for generative foundation models that enable broadly shared benefit. Our initial hypothesis is that data is a high-value lever of governance. Many of these models are trained on publicly available data and use public infrastructure, but 1) may d