Notes on Governance Experience Design

A governance layer is beginning to spread across the Internet. Platform cooperatives, data trusts, encrypted chats, mesh networks, blockchain protocols, DAOs, and more are introducing governable spaces, where users may choose to exercise more control over their digital lives. As the governance surface of online spaces grows, interfaces guide how people interact with each other and the underlying software. A new paradigm is in the making: governance experience design.

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. Make sure participants understand what powers they do and do not have in a given context, to prevent overreach or 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.

Establish rituals and habits of maintenance 🕰️

Community agreements and values must be maintained to function. Rituals can help reinforce shared commitments among participants. Those commitments should be accessible and frequently visible to remind people what they have agreed to. Technologies can support reinforcement at specific intervals, inviting people to revisit and remember their agreements and revise them when necessary.

Enable relationships, not just transactions 🤼

Actions like voting and donating are important, but they are only tips of the governance iceberg. Systems should ensure that participants have spaces for deliberation, debate, and connection. These spaces should support the building of trust and consensus, not merely “engagement,” which often means polarization and division. Real differences matter, but tools should invite people to bridge them wherever possible.

Support diverse pathways for participation 💐

There is no single formula for self-governance—no perfect voting system or group size. Healthy communities generally have multiple concurrent pathways for participation in power, multiple feedback loops. Some people might contribute best as charismatic leaders, while others might be better at making impartial judgements. Some necessary reforms may be possible through existing processes, while others might require changing the processes through protest. Start from the assumption that there should be multiple, overlapping processes rather than searching for a single one. No system is truly universal, but systems with diverse forms of input can be more inclusive and accessible.

Hold space for culture and fun 🦦

Strive for pleasure, not just function. Art, celebration, and sensuousness matter as much in governance as in any other part of human life. Governance experience should not crowd these out with all the serious business. Provide participants with spaces where they can bring their full selves, such as in customizable avatars, backgrounds, sounds, and nomenclature. Recognize that governance practices are profoundly culturally specific, and enable diverse participants to make their spaces for governance their own. Designing for pleasure opens doors for safety and inclusion, motivating the fuller integration of governance into everyday life.

Respect the attention economy 👩‍💻

Taking part in governance is a demand on people’s time and attention. The more that online spaces become self-governable, the more that such demands will grow. Be careful about overwhelming participants with information or expectations. Practice reciprocity: Match what the community asks of them with what it provides. In some cases, it may be appropriate to provide financial compensation or training for governance work. Assume that participants are involved in governance elsewhere as well and have time-constrained lives, and provide APIs where appropriate to support cross-platform integrations. Decision-making algorithms may be indispensable for navigating information overload, but they must be employed with care; they can be powerful tools for guiding our attention, but they can also distract, obfuscate and degrade our agency. Build not just for your own community’s self-governance, but for the future we hope for—a world of more fully self-governed lives.

Provide resources necessary to support participation 🙌

Governance takes time and work. It should not always be assumed that users have that time or the resources to enable participation. Designs should remind users not to place unfair demands on each others’ time and efforts, and to provide resources necessary to support their involvement.

The original version was drafted by Nathan Schneider at DWeb Camp, August 2022, with subsequent improvements by Metagovernance Project contributors Greg Cassel, Val Elefante, Cent Hosten, Kelsie Nabben, Aviv Ovadya, Niccolò Pescetelli, Divya Siddharth, Danny Spitzberg, Ronen Tamari, and Michael Zargham. Thanks to Tucker McLachlan for support with Crowdwrite.