Stanford Seminar - Online communities as model systems for commons governance

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Studying Online Communities

Online communities serve as model systems for studying collective behavior and institutional design.
Advantages of studying online communities include observing large numbers of societies, collecting multi-level data, and studying emergent properties of individual interactions.
Research questions include studying folk theories of collective action and analyzing governance structures in different types of online communities.

Minecraft Server Governance

Analyzed governance choices made by players on Minecraft servers.
Most players opted for communities with a small core group size.
Core group size is proportional to target size for successful communities.
Most governance effort goes into managing bad behavior.
Bigger servers have more focus on empowering the administrator and managing bad behavior.
Institutional diversity is correlated with success.
Norms are more common than rules.
Constitutive rules define abstractions and regulate behavior.
Administrative governance style is positively selected for, while other styles are driven by drift.
Empowering administrators is effective because Minecraft doesn't offer choices and users can easily leave servers.

Apache Software Foundation Governance

The Apache Software Foundation has a specific governance style called the "Apache way" that projects must adopt to join the community.
The Apache way includes principles such as running on earned authority, being a community of peers, having open communications, consensus decision-making, and responsible oversight.
Research question: how do foundation policies relate to project operations and performance?
Data used includes Apache Foundation policies, developer emails for 200 projects, and information about people involved in the projects and project-level metrics.
Natural language processing techniques are used to analyze developer emails and compare them to written rules.
Introduced "institutional grammar" to analyze unstructured policy documents and represent them in a structured manner.
Clustering is performed to identify topics related to governance activity, and the rules and discussions about the rules are extracted.
There is no correlation between the number of rules about a topic and the amount of discussion about it.
The more rules there are about a thing, the less people internalize them.
Internalization is measured as the semantic distance between an email sentence and its nearest rule.
Internalization of standards is important for getting things done in projects.
Policy plays a role in encoding precedents and shaping language use.
The quality of rules can impact their internalization and adherence.
Communities do not always run according to their stated policies, and successful projects tend to govern themselves along domains with less formal structure.

AI Governance and Online Community Management

AI models are becoming increasingly prevalent, and there is a need for governance and licensing frameworks to address their use and compliance with open-source principles.
Tension between the responsible AI community and the open-source community regarding restrictions on AI use.
Focusing on helping people internalize basic governance skills may be more important than creating new structures and processes.
Trolls are attracted to rules in online communities, leading to difficult conversations about rule enforcement.
Minecraft focuses on regulating behavior rather than civility, while Apache emphasizes earning authority through coding skills.
Well-defined user and resource boundaries are crucial for managing trolls effectively.
Different platforms have varying affordances for enforcing restrictions, impacting the types of rules that can be implemented.
As online communities grow larger, traditional governance strategies based on social relationships and trust may struggle.
Democracies and voluntarist systems require a strong foundation of shared skills, norms, and values to function effectively.
Providing training on how to run meetings and manage online spaces could potentially enable larger-scale democratic governance.
Bottom-up strategies for shifting the scope of conversations or rule sets in existing institutions can be challenging, with examples of both successful and unsuccessful cases.
Wikipedia and wikis offer valuable case studies for studying how online communities manage large influxes of new members.
Minecraft's "jubilees" institution supports legitimacy, social support, and trust.