Modular Politics

Nathan Schneider, Primavera De Filippi, Seth Frey, Joshua Z. Tan and Amy X. Zhang 2021. Modular Politics. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. 5 (CSCW1) 16. https://doi.org/10.1145/3449090

TitleModular Politics
TypeJournal article
AuthorsNathan Schneider, Primavera De Filippi, Seth Frey, Joshua Z. Tan and Amy X. Zhang
Abstract

Governance in online communities is an increasingly high-stakes challenge, and yet many basic features of offline governance legacies-juries, political parties, term limits, and formal debates, to name a few-are not in the feature-sets of the software most community platforms use. Drawing on the paradigm of Institutional Analysis and Development, this paper proposes a strategy for addressing this lapse by specifying basic features of a generalizable paradigm for online governance called Modular Politics. Whereas classical governance typologies tend to present a choice among wholesale ideologies, such as democracy or oligarchy, Modular Politics would enable platform operators and their users to build bottom-up governance processes from computational components that are modular and composable, highly versatile in their expressiveness, portable from one context to another, and interoperable across platforms. This kind of approach could implement pre-digital governance systems as well as accelerate innovation in uniquely digital techniques. As diverse communities share and connect their components and data, governance could occur through a ubiquitous network layer. To that end, this paper proposes the development of an open standard for networked governance.

Article number16
JournalProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Journal citation5 (CSCW1)
ISSN2573-0142
Year2021
PublisherACM
Publisher's version
File Access Level
Open (open metadata and files)
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)https://doi.org/10.1145/3449090
Web address (URL)http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3449090
Publication dates
Published13 Apr 2021

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