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.
