CommunityRule

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.

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.

ModGov - Governance for online communities

A simple, flexible framework that helps online communities create shared rules, elect representative moderators, and ensure stability.

PARA

Civic social infrastructure for communities, governance, and public participation.

What ATProto Needs to Support Consentful Distributed Community Governance

How to choose a governance system for your organization

Is your nonprofit, small business, or volunteer group looking for a new way to make decisions? Many groups are questioning our mainstream systems — and that includes the systems by which we make decisions. Governance used to be one of the things we’d all take for granted, and now it’s one of the cho

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.

Build Community Online with Decentralized Tools | Blacksky

Decentralized tools to build community online. The intercommunal net where communities govern, pool funds and stay safe on their own terms.

Build Community Online with Decentralized Tools | Blacksky

Decentralized tools to build community online. The intercommunal net where communities govern, pool funds and stay safe on their own terms.

[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...

Emergence of integrated institutions in a large population of self-governing communities

Collective Governance Directory

A collection of links to publicly available governance documents, published by the collectives that use them.

A Field Guide to More-Than-Human Governance

Ideas for a Changing World.

Connecting Research with Community - Civic Innovation Lab

Welcome to Civic Innovation Lab, where we drive social impact through collaborative solutions and empower communities. Join us in fostering sustainable development, co-creating initiatives, and advancing inclusive governance for a better future.

Home Page

We are an international community of communities bound by a common interest in persistent infrastructure. So far, we have welcomed agencies that manage communities spanning entertainment, standards, the built environment, natural history collections, scholarly communications, and research data.