This paper considers the intersection of governance and attention in digital contexts. In particular, it argues for the relevance of ‘attention economies’, or the analysis of human attention as a resource, to ‘governance surfaces’, or the means available for organisational adaptation and action. Existing theoretical frameworks for the governance of community-managed resources lack adequate consideration for how people’s attention is engaged and directed. To address this gap, this paper proposes heuristics that assess how attention relates to governance in online organisations. The heuristics are informed by literature on attention economies and governance, as well as three case studies that consider recent attempts to address attention in the design of governance surfaces in blockchain-based systems. The resulting heuristics serve as analytical and normative tools to enable researchers and system designers to better understand attention in a governance system. They invite consideration of whether the structure of attention in a system is appropriate, efficient, and just.
Metagov Seminar - Online Governance Surfaces and Attention Economy
Digital Democracy in Decentralised Autonomous Organisations
Decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) are institutional technologies that enable democratic governance innovation. They inherit key democratic principles such as procedural transparency and immutable records from being based on blockchain technology. This paper conducts a systematic literature review to examine governance mechanisms and challenges of digital democracy in DAOs. While issues like power concentration and coordination failures exist in current implementations, we argue that the concept of DAOs offers new opportunities for transparent governance and participatory decision-making. As testbeds for governance experiments, we find that DAOs have the potential to reshape democratic processes and foster innovative governance models in the digital era. Calling for interdisciplinary collaboration, further research is needed around Sybil-resistant voting mechanisms, ideological path dependencies and deliberation mechanisms.
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.
Blockchain Governance: Programming Our Future
This post describes why blockchain governance design is one of the most important problems out there, its critical components, current…
From Users to (Sense)Makers: On the Pivotal Role of Stigmergic Social Annotation in the Quest for Collective Sensemaking
The web has become a dominant epistemic environment, influencing people's beliefs at a global scale. However, online epistemic environments are increasingly polluted, impairing societies' ability to coordinate effectively in the face of global crises. We argue that centralized platforms are a main source of epistemic pollution, and that healthier environments require redesigning how we collectively govern attention. Inspired by decentralization and open source software movements, we propose Open Source Attention, a socio-technical framework for "freeing" human attention from control by platforms, through a decentralized eco-system for creating, storing and querying stigmergic markers; the digital traces of human attention.
Rethinking the cognitive foundations of the attention economy
The attention economy is the economic system in which human attention is the scarce resource. This literature takes a particular passage in Herbert Simon’s seminal Chapter Designing Organization fo...
The Truth About Blockchain
Contracts, transactions, and records of them provide critical structure in our economic system, but they haven’t kept up with the world’s digital transformation. They’re like rush-hour gridlock trapping a Formula 1 race car. Blockchain promises to solve this problem. The technology behind bitcoin, blockchain is an open, distributed ledger that records transactions safely, permanently, and very efficiently. For instance, while the transfer of a share of stock can now take up to a week, with blockchain it could happen in seconds. Blockchain could slash the cost of transactions and eliminate intermediaries like lawyers and bankers, and that could transform the economy. But, like the adoption of more internet technologies, blockchain’s adoption will require broad coordination and will take years. In this article the authors describe the path that blockchain is likely to follow and explain how firms should think about investments in it.
Stuck in the middleware with you: the challenges of capitalizing a market-oriented approach to platform governance
T1 - Stuck in the middleware with you: the challenges of capitalizing a market-oriented approach to platform governance
Fractured reality
The report examines the evolving impact of digital technologies on European democracy. In an era of a global struggle to control the information space, this report offers critical insights into the fracturing of perceived realities, the rise of the ‘fantasy-industrial complex’, and the systemic risks posed by the attention economy. It exposes how platforms algorithmically prioritise engagement over accuracy, reinforcing ideological echo chambers and amplifying mis- and disinformation that erode democratic resilience. The report highlights how structural incentives and foreign control of the most important players in the information space undermine information integrity, collective knowledge and civic discourse. In response, the report presents a number of recommendations from fostering alternative public spaces and crowd-sourced knowledge systems to reforming business models, restoring user agency, and advancing EU digital sovereignty through decentralised infrastructure
The Internet Transition
The Internet is allowing us to build a richer, more complex society but the way in which we Internet today is failing to support the governance systems that a more complex world requires. I take a look at why these issues are related, try to develop an intuition for a way forward, and point at the emerging field that is coming together to build that future.
Toward a theory of network gatekeeping: A framework for exploring information control
Abstract Gatekeeping theories have been a popular heuristic for describing information control for years, but none have attained a full theoretical status in the context of networks. This article aims to propose a theory of network gatekeeping comprised of two components: identification and salience . Network gatekeeping identification lays out vocabulary and naming foundations through the identification of gatekeepers, gatekeeping, and gatekeeping mechanisms. Network gatekeeping salience , which is built on the bases of the network identification theory, utilizes this infrastructure to understand relationships among gatekeepers and between gatekeepers and gated, the entity subjected to a gatekeeping process. Network gatekeeping salience 1 Salience refers to the degree to which gatekeepers give priority to competing gated claims. proposes identifying gated and their salience to gatekeepers by four attributes: (a) their political power in relation to the gatekeeper, (b) their information production ability , (c) their relationship with the gatekeeper, and (d) their alternatives in the context of gatekeeping.
A Polycentric Governance Lens on Data Infrastructures
Funding policies for data infrastructure promote open data sharing to drive positive social impact. However, concerns regarding the long-term management of data within and across distributed infrastructures can hinder data sharing. We draw upon the concept of polycentric governance to demonstrate how collaborative practices of data curation, in preparing and maintaining data for (future) sharing, provide a solid foundation for understanding data governance within data infrastructures. Based on a qualitative case study of a distributed ecological network, we investigate the conditions under which data are managed as a shared resource by local actors to ensure the long-term (re)usability of data. We contribute to CSCW by conceptualising data curation as a complex form of governance practice with multiple centres of decision-making, each of which operates with some degree of autonomy in data infrastructures. A polycentric governance lens on data infrastructures advances the CSCW conception of data curation as a collective governance practice that can cultivate a data democracy culture within and across organisations, empower individuals to be accountable for their data, and foster a mindset shift toward decentralised data governance.
The Paradox of Open
Numerous organisations and initiatives have been launched with a belief in openness and free knowledge. Their proponents placed their bets on the combined power of networked information services and new governance models for the production and sharing of content and data. We – as members of this broad movement – were among those who believed it possible to leverage this combination of power and opportunity to build a more democratic society, unleashing the power of the internet to create universal access to knowledge and culture. For us, such openness meant not only freedom, but also presented a path to justice and equality.
An attention economic perspective on the future of the information age
In this paper, we apply an attention economic perspective to explain current and predict future trends in our society. We first describe the rise of the attention economy, and we highlight one important mechanism of this economy: a spiral of attention scarcity. Second, we show that an attention economic perspective provides glimpses of a potential future. In particular, we predict an information environment that increasingly targets citizens with attention-grabbing content, form, and technology; a continuing trend toward excessive media consumption levels; and a continuing trend toward inattentive uses of information. We also predict increasing problems of public misinformation and misconceptions; an increased prevalence of certain mental and physical health issues; and an increased reliance on technology to perform mental tasks. At the end of this paper, we show why and how despite these predictions, alternative futures are conceivable. These alternatives largely depend on the behavior of various social actors. We discuss resistance to the attention economy by consumers and producers, a laissez-faire policy toward the attention economy, a policy of taxing attention-seeking efforts, and the promotion of public values in regulatory policies toward the internet.
The Politics of Open Infrastructures: Power, Governance, and Justice in Digital Knowledge Practices
This volume examines how openness is designed, governed, contested and lived in contemporary digital knowledge infrastructures. From open source software and internet standards, to citizen science platforms, public sector data systems and alternative computing practices, the book shows that infrastructures are never neutral technical backbones.
