A simple, flexible framework that helps online communities create shared rules, elect representative moderators, and ensure stability.
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.
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.
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.
Metagov
Metagov is a laboratory for digital governance. Our mission is to cultivate tools, practices, and communities that enable self-governance in the digital age.
The Relational Origins of Rules in Online Communities
Where do rules come from in online communities? This study investigates how and why online communities adopt and change their rules. We conducted a grounded theory-based analysis of 40 in-depth interviews with community leaders from subreddits, Fandom wikis, and Fediverse servers, and identified seven processes involved in the adoption of online community rules. Our findings reveal that, beyond operational reasons like regulating behavior and solving problems, rules are also adopted and changed for relational reasons, such as signaling or reinforcing community legitimacy and identity to other communities. While rule change was often prompted by challenges during community growth or decline, change also depended on volunteer leaders' work capacity, the presence of member feedback mechanisms, and relational dynamics between leaders and members. Our findings extend prior theories from social computing and organizational research, illustrating how institutionalist and ecological explanations of the relational origins of rules complement operational accounts. Finally, we build on these explanations to offer a set of design propositions that reflect the relational aspects of rules and rulemaking across communities' lifecycles.
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.
An internet of many autonomous communities
What if communities were built into the protocol? Delegated moderation, verification badges, and reciprocity systems for autonomous online communities.
What ATProto Needs to Support Consentful Distributed Community Governance
Empowering science communities with open, democratic, researcher-owned infrastructure.
We’re building communities and tech for publishing, curating, sharing, and discussing research online using ATProto and other decentralized protocols.
Empowering science communities with open, democratic, researcher-owned infrastructure.
We’re building communities and tech for publishing, curating, sharing, and discussing research online using ATProto and other decentralized protocols.
Designing decentralized moderation
In decentralized social networks, moderation decisions are made locally by users, servers, or other network entities. This basic…
Permissioned Data Shapes: Community-Moderated Content - Nick's Blog
A community can own spaces the way a person does: a club's members post to each other under a dedicated community DID, with a feed space for content, a moderation space for notes, a labels space for filtering, and a single app view as the only window into any of it.
CivilServant: Citizen Science for Online Communities - Citizens and Technology Lab
Moderators of online communities, often volunteers, work hard to protect their communities from harassment, misinformation, trolls, and other online harms. But which policies and procedures actually work?
Auto Moderation in Discord
Automated moderation can play a large role in rule enforcement and keeping your community safe even when there aren’t always eyes to do it for you.
