On Governance Archeology

Abstract: How different is a historical diamond industry community offering loyal merchants access to more precious stones from a Web3 platform, which allows skilled creators to join it, giving its starred members token-gated access to certain discords? Not very - an elite merchant can bid on a stone and sell it independently, a creator can network effectively and land a larger project. The same mechanism of positive reinforcement is at play : if you bolster the institution by adhering to its rules, and contribute positively to it, you can leverage its collective power for personal gain. 

This link is unsurprising given that both self-governing institutions and online communities were formed to supplement, if not actively subvert, flawed structures that dictate rules based on centralised authority. Being in the room where Reserve Bank of India officials walked in to shut down a blockchain panel seemed akin to watching Dutch officials’ encirclement of strongholds of the Minangbakau clan. However, while the panel crumbled and the wing of the organisation creating self-regulatory mechanisms for crypto-based lending platforms soon collapsed, the Minangbakau held their own. Moreover, they succeeded in doing so without ceding power or agreeing to pay exorbitant taxes to the Dutch. Perhaps, then, online communities could do well to learn from and harness the institutional mechanisms that made these historical tribes so robust. 

Governance Archaeology is a detailed repository of historical communities and encodes their mechanisms, cultural values and norms, and meta-mechanisms. It has already yielded novel insights that defy popular beliefs about self-governance, such as the notion communities can govern most effectively within smaller groups and by using hierarchies. However, by analysing communities spanning across centuries and continents, it is clear that independent of size and purpose, collective governance works better when institutions “1) allow members to collectively articulate and amend the rules, and 2) define and enforce appropriate forms of redress for those who misbehave” (Carugati, Nepozitek, 2022). 

However, there are a myriad of means to achieve these two ends, and which mix of mechanisms works is still difficult to objectively pin down, especially given the remarkable diversity of applications of self-governance in the current context. 

But surely, one thinks, this is not new knowledge. A similar database mapping the governance mechanisms of modern communities would be more useful for cross-pollination, and grafting of institutional techniques from one arena or platform to another. This is exactly what Govbase does. 

And yes, historical communities, while fascinating in and of themselves, did not have ground-breaking mechanisms : they used committees, councils, petitions and monitoring, much as we do today, to govern effectively. 

So why is it important to build a bridge between Governance Archaeology and Govbase? It’s because labels in and of themselves mean very little until we’re clear about how they work in practise. A simple example would be deterring individuals from swindling other users on online platforms. The obvious, technical solution would be charging a hefty fine or disabling the profiles of cheaters on the platform. An online community facing this issue could look around to find other Web3 platforms using smart contract based solutions which, instead of tracking down violators, attempt to prevent violations in real time. But even these are susceptible to reentrancy attacks, or more subtle scams like integer underflow/overflow. Essentially, when the solution is technical, there will be ways around it. Where there is a law, there will be a loophole. 

But what if online communities could look to the past for inspiration? Raid Guild could see that merchant guilds, where goods were of substantial value and obtaining redress through courts was erratic, if not impossible, punished cheaters in a less conventional way. Not only were they expelled, they were publicly shamed. Their portraits were hung in guild meeting halls and clubs, where they were slandered by their peers and denied entry. So, Raid Guild might use this to put up pictographs of ostracised former members on its home page and create a strong cognisance within its community of certain kinds of behaviour being unacceptable. 

Since historical communities much precede digital, even technical trappings, their normative mechanisms are especially cogent. Thus, their insights could be of value. 

Having said that, these insights must be distilled, because some of them simply aren’t feasible today. Kinship ties or alliances through marriage may be efficacious mechanisms, but obviously cannot be replicated in a virtual environment. 

It should require minimal effort for an online community to deploy tools from the past, and the ideal experience would look like this : the user opens the Mechanisms view of Govbase, filters the table to show only those mechanisms which belong to the ontology of Governance Archaeology, and can see how an institutional structure fits into the broader design. Positive reinforcement, for instance, is a subclass of ‘ambiguous or informal decision making’ and is a component of the wide spanning category ‘values, ideologies, incentives, and other motivations.’ If this is of interest to the online community, it can also look at other mechanisms which belong to the category of informal decision making, like criticism or handshakes, and read the records of these to understand how they worked in specific historical communities.

game theoryhuman-computer interactionsocial and information networkslaw and economics

Audience: researchers in the topic

( chat | video )

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Metagovernance Seminar

Series comments: The Metagovernance Seminar invites individuals working in online governance to present their work to a community of other researchers and practitioners. Topics of the seminar include, but are not limited to, computational tools for governance, governance incidents and case studies from online communities, topics in cryptoeconomics, and the design of digital constitutions.

See archived videos: archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Metagovernance%20Seminar%22

The seminar is intended for researchers and practitioners in online governance, broadly defined. We welcome guests and curious members of the public, but please note that the discussion is moderated. Our governance structure is defined here: metagov.pubpub.org/metagov-governance

Please contact a planning committee member (Cent Hosten, Nathan Schneider, Divya Siddarth, Michael Zargham, Joshua Tan, and Seth Frey) if you are interested in becoming a member of the seminar.

Where available, a direct link to the archived video is linked beneath the video tags.

Join our community to participate in the discussions around this series: metagov.org/join/community

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- Time: every Wednesday at 12:00pm ET (GMT-4). - Meeting Link: us06web.zoom.us/j/89076250096?pwd=flXetP53CxRFX7emjtiDhkbCR0CjBx.1

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