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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.

 

Open-source Software (OSS) has become a valuable resource in both industry and academia over the last few decades. Despite the innovative structures they develop to support the projects, OSS projects and their communities have complex needs and face risks such as getting abandoned. To manage the internal social dynamics and community evolution, OSS developer communities have started relying on written governance documents that assign roles and responsibilities to different community actors. To facilitate the study of the impact and effectiveness of formal governance documents on OSS projects and communities, we present a longitudinal dataset of 710 GitHub-hosted OSS projects with GOVERNANCE.MD governance files. This dataset includes all commits made to the repository, all issues and comments created on GitHub, and all revisions made to the governance file. We hope its availability will foster more research interest in studying how OSS communities govern their projects and the impact of governance files on communities.