PolicyKit: Building Governance in Online Communities

Abstract

The software behind online community platforms encodes a governance model that represents a strikingly narrow set of governance possibilities focused on moderators and administrators. When online communities desire other forms of government, such as ones that take many members' opinions into account or that distribute power in non-trivial ways, communities must resort to laborious manual effort. In this paper, we present PolicyKit, a software infrastructure that empowers online community members to concisely author a wide range of governance procedures and automatically carry out those procedures on their home platforms. We draw on political science theory to encode community governance into policies, or short imperative functions that specify a procedure for determining whether a user-initiated action can execute. Actions that can be governed by policies encompass everyday activities such as posting or moderating a message, but actions can also encompass changes to the policies themselves, enabling the evolution of governance over time. We demonstrate the expressivity of PolicyKit through implementations of governance models such as a random jury deliberation, a multi-stage caucus, a reputation system, and a promotion procedure inspired by Wikipedia's Request for Adminship (RfA) process. CCS Concepts •Human-centered computing → Collaborative and social computing systems and tools;

What Makes Online Communities 'Better'? Measuring Values, Consensus, and Conflict across Thousands of Subreddits

“…We find that moderators perceive their communities as 14.7% less democratic, think they should be 56.7% less democratic, and that democracy is 23.6% less important, relative to the average non-moderator in each community. This has important implications for the implementation of participatory governance practices in online communities [77] ( §6).…”

Experimenting With Online Governance

“…For example, introducing bots into popular areas in the multiplayer game Second Life allowed researchers to examine how the "age" and "gender" of bots' avatars affected the avatar's chances of obtaining help from other players (Zhang et al, 2020b). They can also provide and validate governance tools for virtual worlds, such as research providing governance tools on the integrated game chat platform Discord (Zhang et al, 2020a), or community monitoring tools on the video game Minecraft (Müller et al, 2015). However, to our knowledge, this article is the first to present a framework for virtual world experiments that are designed specifically for studying governance.…”

“…However, there is now a trend toward replacing such centralized approaches with more democratic governance methods. Toolkits such as Modular Politics (Schneider et al, 2020), PolicyKit (Zhang et al, 2020a), and others (Bojanowski et al, 2017;Matias and Mou, 2018;Jhaver et al, 2019) now provide online communities with self-governance tools that can be tailored to fit the needs and values of specific communities. These include online voting, juries, petition, elected boards, and even more complex institutional logics (e.g., see https://communityrule.info/ templates/).…”

Becoming a Platform in Europe: On the Governance of the Collaborative Economy

“…For example, one participant has developed CommunityRule (https: //communityrule.info), an online tool to facilitate democratic governance by utilizing pre-defined and customizable templates based on common practices of informal online communities. Furthermore, other computational tools, like PolicyKit (Zhang et al, 2020), have been recently devised by scholars in computing, drawing on established theoretical frameworks for describing governance arrangements, e.g. from early design guidelines of Ostrom's Institutional Analysis and Development on commons (1990), which suggests the right of community members to formulate their own rules.…”