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The experiences people have with governance shape communities in profound ways. An early experience participating in an inclusive process can lead to a lifetime of faith in the power of self-governance. If a process does not feel respectful to someone, they will not respect the process. Governance that asks too much of community members will keep them from participating, while asking too little of them might lead them to take the community for granted. How we design the experience of governance will shape the flows of power.
Self-governance is a practice as old as human communities in general, and it occurs all around us among non-human life. Yet there are aspects of online networks that make governing on them a new kind of undertaking: the speed of interaction, the global reach, the requisite skills, and the distinct opportunities for interference and manipulation. As we build the governance interface paradigm, we acknowledge the need to honor the experience of our ancestors across time, space, cultures, and species.
What follows are notes intended for the designers of the surfaces, processes, norms and interfaces for online governance. This is a living document, first developed through research and experimentation in the Metagovernance Project, which will continue stewarding the text's ongoing development through improvement proposals from readers.
Help communities set clear expectations 📏
All governance depends on basic ground rules. Participants should know and understand them. Motivate communities to establish a code of conduct that encourages positive behaviors and ensures that harmful behavior can be identified and addressed.Motivate communities to establish an explicit, published Code of sConduct Best Practices. Make sure participants understand what powers they do and do not have in a given context, to prevent overreach or disappointment.This:
- encourages positive behaviors,
- supports system users to identify and form consensus on harmful and unwanted behavior and langauge,
- facilitates consensus on how to address unwanted behavior by policy.
Code of Conduct Best Practices support participants to understand what language and rhetoric is, and is not, aligned with the values of the platform (multiple contexts may be specified). This reduces confusion, overreach and disappointment.
Let people, not just software, decide how power flows 💃
Often the design of online governance serves the convenience of the tech, not the instincts of people. All-powerful admins are rare in offline life, but they are easy to program, so we see them everywhere in online spaces. The stakes are too high for us to tolerate lazy defaults. Governance tools should be expressive enough for participants to choose the processes they want to use or even design their own. When automated algorithms guide processes, they should be subject to human oversight at key points of their inputs and outputs.
Make systems explicit and transparent by default ☀️
Tyrannies of structurelessness are common online: the lack of an explicit power structure produces an especially rigid and unaccountable one, invisible to most participants. Governance tools should help people see how power operates, including both the shared values and the specific rules that express them. Interfaces, in turn, should be accessible up and down the ladder of participation, showing newcomers how to get involved and encouraging veterans to share their knowledge more widely. Balance complete transparency with the need for private spaces that enable learning, risk-taking, mistake-making, and relationship-building.