Binding Chaos: Mass Collaboration on a Global Scale

The Purpose of Protocols

Every open social protocol generates shared resources, but none has produced a governance framework adequate to those resources. So who fills that vacuum?

The Purpose of Protocols

Every open social protocol generates shared resources, but none has produced a governance framework adequate to those resources. So who fills that vacuum?

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 Authoritarian Stack: Mapping Big Tech’s Capture of State Power - Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung

A new project exposes the infrastructure of techno-oligarchic control — and why Europe must act

CommunityRule

A governance toolkit for great communities

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.

A Field Guide to More-Than-Human Governance

Ideas for a Changing World.

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

What ATProto Needs to Support Consentful Distributed Community Governance

Why Online Democracies Fail - Eclectic Corvine Muses

A compendium to my upcoming proposal for community infrastructure within the AT Protocol

Making Community Governance Legible: A Semester with Bonfire

A collaboration with Princeton explores how Governance Cards can help communities explain how they organise, make decisions, and care for their shared spaces.

New Project to Tackle the Challenge of Scaling Democratic Innovations | CoP CC on Participatory and Deliberative Democracy

The “Missing Link” between Research and Society

Critical Mess to Critical Mass: democratic innovation for collective climate action

How democratic innovation can build trust to unlock and mobilise collective intelligence for meaningful collective action. With Prof Oliver Escobar.

Consensus Democracy | The Paper Pilot

The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology