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Online communities rely on effective governance for success, and volunteer moderators are crucial for ensuring such governance. Despite their significance, much remains to be explored in understanding the relationship between community governance processes and moderators’ psychological experiences. To bridge this gap, we conducted an online survey with over 600 moderators from Reddit communities, exploring the link between different governance strategies and moderators’ needs and motivations. Our investigation reveals a contrast to conventional views on democratic governance within online communities. While participatory processes are associated with higher levels of perceived fairness, they are also linked with reduced feelings of community belonging and lower levels of institutional acceptance among moderators. Our findings challenge the assumption that greater democratic involvement unequivocally leads to positive community outcomes, suggesting instead that more centralized governance approaches can also positively affect moderators’ psychological well-being and, by extension, community cohesion and effectiveness. 

As technology and new media create increasingly accessible forms of organization, and empower more people to build communities, the challenge of systematically and intentionally building culture becomes relevant to more people. What defines a “healthy”, “strong”, or “good” culture? Is culture building possible, or is culture so inherently bottom up as to defy intention and system? What is the work of culture building? Does it have clear steps or stages? Are there principles of culture building that can be communicated and taught? Or is the work of culture building fundamentally idiosyncratic and restricted to those few with an inarticulable knack for it? We survey the definitions, perspectives, practices, and insights of 16 professional culture builders: practicing organizational consultants whose practices span large traditional organizations, small teams, multi-organization networks, mission-driven organizations, and decentralized organizations. Organizing and taxonomizing their perspectives and practices, we distill 5 common components of strong culture and 17 common practices for building it. After concluding that culture building work is clear, articulable, and accessible, we develop an argument that organizations and communities should approach culture building systematically and intentionally by empowering a community manager to organize, surface, and focus the needs of members toward a continuously adapting and iterating culture of culture building. With this work, we complement computational technologies for building organizational flows and processes with established social technologies for building shared trust, meaning, beliefs, goals, values, purpose, and identity, toward more meaningful organizations, and a population of leaders who are more effective at bringing people together. 

Building a successful community means governing active populations and limited resources. This challenge often requires communities to design formal governance systems from scratch. But the characteristics of successful institutional designs are unclear. Communities that are more mature and established may have more elaborate formal policy systems (as cause or effect of their success). Alternatively, they may require less formalization precisely because of their maturity: because they have more latitude and capacity to select and acculturate new members, or because their reputations encourage greater self-selection. Indeed, scholars often downplay the role that formal rules relative to unwritten rules, norms, and values. But in a community with formal rules, decisions are more consistent, transparent, and legitimate. To understand the relationship of formal institutions to community maturity and governance style, we conduct a large-scale quantitative analysis applying institutional analysis frameworks of self-governance scholar Elinor Ostrom to 80,000 communities across 3 platforms: the sandbox game Minecraft, the MMO game World of Warcraft, and Reddit. We classify communities' written rules according to several institutional taxonomies in order to test predictors of institutional formalization. From this analysis we extract two major findings. First, institutional formalization, the size and complexity of an online community's governance system, is generally positively associated with maturity, as measured by age, population size, or degree of user engagement. Second, we find that online communities employ similar governance styles across platforms, strongly favoring weak norms to strong requirements. These findings suggest that designers and founders of online communities converge, to some extent independently, on styles of governance practice that are correlated with successful self-governance. With deeper insights into the patterns of successful self-governance, we can help more communities overcome the challenges of self-governance and create for their members powerful experiences of shared meaning and collective empowerment.?