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Many have criticized the centralized and unaccountable governance of prominent online social platforms, leading to renewed interest in platform governance that incorporates multiple centers of power. Decentralization of power can arise horizontally, through parallel communities, each with local administration, and vertically, through multiple hierarchies of overlapping jurisdiction. Drawing from literature on federalism and polycentricity in analogous offline institutions, we scrutinize the landscape of existing platforms through the lens of multi-level governance. Our analysis describes how online platforms incorporate varying forms and degrees of decentralized governance. In particular, we propose a framework that characterizes the general design space and the various ways that middle levels of governance vary in how they can interact with a centralized governance system above and end users below. This focus provides a starting point for new lines of inquiry between platform- and community-governance scholarship. By engaging themes of decentralization, hierarchy, power, and responsibility, while discussing concrete examples, we connect designers and theorists of online spaces.

 

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. 

We present a survey to evaluate crypto-political, crypto-economic, and crypto-governance sentiment in people who are part of a blockchain ecosystem. Based on 3,710 survey responses, we describe their beliefs, attitudes, and modes of participation in crypto and investigate how self-reported political affiliation and blockchain ecosystem affiliation are associated with these. We observed polarization in questions on perceptions of the distribution of economic power, personal attitudes towards crypto, normative beliefs about the distribution of power in governance, and external regulation of blockchain technologies. Differences in political self-identification correlated with opinions on economic fairness, gender equity, decision-making power and how to obtain favorable regulation, while blockchain affiliation correlated with opinions on governance and regulation of crypto and respondents’ semantic conception of crypto and personal goals for their involvement. We also find that a theory-driven constructed political axis is supported by the data and investigate the possibility of other groupings of respondents or beliefs arising from the data. 

This dataset contains 710 GitHub-hosted OSS projects, which contain a governance file in the root directory of the project. It also contains commits, issues, and comments on each project.

 

Institutions and cultures usually evolve in response to environmental incentives. However, sometimes institutional change occurs due to stochastic drivers beyond current fitness, including drift, path dependency, blind imitation, and complementary cooperation in fluctuating environments. Disentangling the selective and stochastic components of social system change enables us to identify the key features of long-term organizational development. Evolutionary approaches provide organizational science with abundant theories to demonstrate organizational evolution by tracking beneficial or harmful features. In this study, focusing on 20,000 Minecraft communities, we measure these drivers empirically using two of the most widely applied evolutionary models: the Price equation and the bet-hedging model. As a result, we find strong selection pressure on administrative and information rules, suggesting that their positive correlation with community fitness is the main reason for their frequency change. We also find that stochastic drivers decrease the average frequency of administrative rules. The result makes sense when viewed in the context of evolutionary bet-hedging. We show through the bet-hedging result that institutional diversity contributes to the growth and stability of rules related to information, communication, and economic behaviors.