The zine contends that many recent sites of community building, especially online, have lacked the tools and norms for the practice of conflict. Many reasonable expectations that go by names like due process, justice, accountability, or mediation are unavailable or not even considered in emerging communities. The platforms that communities rely on treat conflict as a corporate liability, not a chance to strengthen relationships.
Community Interaction and Conflict on the Web
Community Interaction and Conflict on the Web
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.
Composable Trust, Part 1: Communities Without Credible Exit - Eclectic Corvine Muses
We guarantee that users aren’t subject to platforms. Yet communities are still subject to their stewards. Can we fix this?
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.
New Paradigms in Trust and Safety: Navigating Defederation on Decentralized Social Media Platforms
Defederation on decentralized social media offers new possibilities for online governance. Experts consider how it can be used responsibly, in a way that balances speech and safety.
ModGov - Governance for online communities
A simple, flexible framework that helps online communities create shared rules, elect representative moderators, and ensure stability.
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.
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.
Transforming Social Media Governance With Applied Theories of Justice – lindsay blackwell
This dissertation explores ways in which social media governance can be improved through the practical application of theories and principles of justice. Three empirical research studies demonstrate that current platform governance practices exacerbate the very harms they seek to mitigate, due in large part to the influence of punitive criminal justice models that are structurally incapable of producing equitable governance outcomes. Informed by transformative justice, social media governance can be reframed from a method for control to a practice of collective care, requiring a fundamental restructuring of the systems and logics that currently govern online spaces.
Binding Chaos: Mass Collaboration on a Global Scale
The world is long overdue for a completely new system of governance. If there was ever a need for political representation or a paternalistic and opaque authority, it has been removed by technology. Every political system we have tried has proven incapable of protecting human rights and dignity. Every political system we have tried has devolved into oligarchy. To effect the change we require immediately, to give individuals control and responsibility, to bring regional systems under regional governance, allow global collaboration and protect the heritage of future generations, we need a new political model.
What Good Is ‘Community’ When Someone Else Makes All the Rules? (Published 2018)
Life online can offer us a sense of belonging in any number of virtual villages. But the power to control those spaces isn’t very communal at all.
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.
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.
Nonviolent Communication: the key to improve your relationships
Nonviolent communication (NVC) is a popular method of conflict resolution that privileges unbiased evidence and specificity.
