PolicyKit: A System for Authoring and Enacting Governance in Online Communities

Abstract: The governance of most online communities today as embedded in the software of their community platform has little variation beyond a UNIX-like permissions model granting administrators and moderators broad power over users. However, this model is unable to express many forms of governance that communities might prefer, including democratic ones that give users a greater say in decision-making. In this work, we present PolicyKit, a system that empowers users to author a broad range of governance models that can then be enacted on their community platform of choice. PolicyKit introduces software abstractions motivated by political science theory to describe governance as a set of one-off actions that can be proposed by users, along with a set of user-authored policies, or continually-running imperative functions that specify how and whether actions can execute. Actions cover both everyday activities that happen on platforms as well as changes to the governance model itself, allowing for user-led evolution of governance over time.

game theoryhuman-computer interactionsocial and information networkslaw and economics

Audience: researchers in the topic

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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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