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This paper proposes the concept of protocological governance, an account of the interplay in the enactment of protocols between sovereignty and entanglement. Protocols, understood as patterns that organize interactions among agents, are increasingly central to social and technical systems, ranging from digital networks and climate accords to Indigenous cultural practices. While protocols offer a means of sovereignty through decentralization and resistance to capture by external entities such as states or corporations, their entanglement with other systems introduces both vulnerabilities and conditions for their usefulness. The paper takes current developments in Web3 as a starting point, clarifies the distinctions between mere protocols and the protocological, and explores how protocols can assert sovereignty while being embedded in social life through a series of encounters in practice between protocols and other systems – in religious and anthropological history, Internet standards, and diplomatic agreements. Drawing on media philosophy, media anthropology, and performativity, the analysis shows how protocols can become tools for generative, relational governance through the tension between sovereignty and entanglement. The paper concludes by introducing the concept of protocological chiasm, which describes the dynamic tension between abstract patterns of protocol and their material instantiations, re-introducing the human body as a key element for resistance against capture. Protocological governance thus represents an emergent organizational form with the potential to reshape power structures. 

Open educational resources (OER) constitute a form of digital media that have received growing interest and adoption. Infrastructures are becoming more widely available to support OER authorship and adaptation. However, this article argues that infrastructures for the ongoing governance of OER have been lacking, despite the medium’s possibilities as “evolutionary media.” The article provides a review of existing literature on OER and their governance, in conversation with the governance of other kinds of software commons. It then offers an auto-ethnographic reflection on the authors’ experience with the challenges of OER maintenance in the context of a specific textbook on social media, and the resulting need for taking governance seriously. Finally, the article proposes strategies for improving support for OER governance through collaborative processes among their stakeholders. 

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. 

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.</p>