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Fascinating Ostrom-inspired framing for online community governance, replacing monolithic permissions (“admins can hide threads”) with richer policies that can be proposed & evolved by the community (eg “threads reported by 10 long-term users are hidden until a jury can vote...”)

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Amy X Zhang

@amyxzh

· Aug 17, 2020

Ever notice how most community software encodes an admin/mod model? What about other models, like democracy? What if communities could *build for themselves* the governance that suits them? Presenting our #uist2020 paper on "PolicyKit: Building Governance in Online Communities"!

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3:10 PM · Oct 21, 2020Twitter Web App

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(Incidentally,

’s group consistently does some of my favorite work in academic HCI; definitely follow their work if you’re not already!)

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Oct 21, 2020

One other thing I dig about this paper is that it’s prototyped on top of existing platforms (Reddit, Slack) via APIs. Many researchers would have made a freestanding demo social network instead: it would be easier in various ways. But it would be disconnected from serious use.

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This might be relevant for you

Mike Sellers - always working on N+1 projects

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and

Howard, this brings to mind our many discussions on evolving shared regulation mechanisms in online communities. I feel like this area's been stunted for a couple of decades. Maybe it's finally coming back.

(((Howard Rheingold)))

@hrheingold

Oct 21, 2020

If only Facebook had not swamped the ecosystem of online communities. Of course I wish I had access to this 20 years ago

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One issue with complex permission models is that it can yield situations where the users don't properly secure their data because they don't understand the permissions system.