How to Build Governable Spaces for Online Communities

I’ve seen it again and again: A group gets started, gets working on something good an important, and then falls apart because some internal conflict arises. During the early days of Covid-19, mutual aid projects appeared in many towns and neighborhoods to help people help each other through a difficult time. It was inspiring. But in the years since, I have kept hearing stories of how what I then feared came to pass. When the initial excitement wore off, or when donations declined, little and big disagreements tore most of those groups apart.

Because of the lockdowns, many of those communities relied heavily on online tools to communicate. There, shooting off an insult or pressing “unfollow” are easier to do than their face-to-face equivalents. Further, starting with the earliest online communities in the 1970s and 1980s, a design pattern of “implicit feudalism” took hold. From Facebook Groups to group chats, social-media software assumes that there should be an all-powerful admin or moderator; the primary tools for problem-solving are digital censorship or exile.

By and large, that is, online platforms are not well designed for communities to self-govern. The usual methods for group governance offline—explicit bylaws, boards of directors, Robert’s Rules of Order, and so forth—are almost nowhere to be found online. Our online spaces still have yet to catch up to the lessons learned from offline ones. If we want to build governable spaces for our communities, we need to be intentional about it. The software won’t do it for us.

In what follows, I’ll suggest a series of steps for how online communities can set themselves up for healthy problem-solving. This is not a complete program or a universal script, but it can serve as a checklist of questions that you can apply to your particular context. You should decide what is most relevant.

Codes of Conduct: What are the basic expectations?

For years, software developer Coraline Ada Ehmke called on the conferences she attended to adopt clear codes of conduct. At first they refused, claiming that such rules were unnecessary. But Ehmke, as a trans woman, knew how toxic those spaces could be for marginalized participants, and she helped more people raise their voices, too. Now, the Contributor Covenant she created has become a widespread norm in tech communities.

When a code of conduct is in place, it is easier for leaders to enforce basic expectations of decency. A code of conduct reduces the gray area and the temptation to tolerate toxic behavior.

When you’re setting up a community space, adopt a battle-tested code like the Contributor Covenant. What I often do—at the start of a class or the first meeting of a new group—is share the Contributor Covenant and invite participants to edit it. Based on their ideas, we create our own version attuned to our needs.

Rules: How does power flow?

There are important questions a code of conduct doesn’t answer: Who has the right to implement the rules and change them? If there are specific leaders, how are they accountable to others in the group?

Offline organizations often answer these questions in their bylaws—a document written in formal legalese, with off-putting jargon and turns of phrase. When MEDLab started building a platform to help mutual-aid groups self-govern, we called it CommunityRule, inspired by how some monasteries call their ancient bylaws simply a “rule.” Online communities don’t need legalese, usually. They just need some basic protocols in place for how decision-making works and how their norms should evolve.

Disputes: How do you resolve conflicts?

Even when there is a code and a rule in place, ambiguities will arise. People will feel harmed by others, and they will disagree about how and why. In the rule or elsewhere, plan ahead for how the community will resolve disputes. What does a legitimate resolution look like?

I have taken a lot of inspiration on this point from guidebooks for “transformative justice”—efforts to address harm in more holistic ways than resorting to policing and incarceration. But work is needed to make these processes accessible, especially for online contexts. This is something MEDLab plans to focus on in the coming year.

Economies: What resources and rewards are needed?

In many online communities, the underlying economies are hidden from view. Someone may be in a position of managing the community because they are paid to do it by their job, or because they have a job that affords them the time to do it outside of paid work. A community might seem almost magical when economies are hidden, because it creates an experience of a gift economy, of pure voluntarism. But over time such systems often leave people without access to the economic flows feeling disempowered and excluded.

Try to make the economies at work in your community explicit. If they don’t seem fair, talk about how to make them fairer. The platform Open Collective is designed for communities that want to make their financial transactions transparent; hard conversations may be easier if there is a shared source of truth. If your community creates content, be sure to decide on the terms for sharing it, such as by adopting Creative Commons or Ethical Source licenses.

Stacks: Who controls your tools?

Ultimately, self-governance in online spaces should involve some ability to govern the tools we rely on. Even platforms like Reddit and Discord, which give admins wide latitude to customize their spaces, can always change the tools on you or pull the plug. The dominant online economy does not make it easy for communities to control their own tools. Any little bit of control you can get, at least, is a step in the right direction.

Here at MEDLab, we manage a set of open-source collaboration tools together thanks to platforms such as Cloudron, Nextcloud, and Matrix. We can do this at relatively low cost and without tech support—just a willingness to try things, endure mistakes, and learn. New_Public has a handle Digital Spaces Directory full of examples of things you can try. Even if you don’t have the skills for managing a server, keep asking: How could we self-govern our tools a bit more fully?

Share what you learn

Building governable spaces shouldn’t require reinventing the wheel. First, draw lessons from offline practices you’re familiar with; they are often perfectly applicable to online life, with a few tweaks. When you take steps in the direction of self-governance, share your lessons and best practices so others can learn from them. On CommunityRule, there is a library where users have shared their rule designs for others to copy and adapt. When you start or enter a community, try to ensure that the basics are in place—a code of conduct and at least a simple rule for decision-making and accountability.

The things I’ve discussed here are bedrocks. What really makes communities healthy is what you build on top of them. Most of the time you shouldn’t need to worry about codes of conduct and rules, because your culture should take care of itself. But having those bedrocks there, when the culture breaks down, can be the difference between survival and collapse. For all the codes, rules, and tools you adopt, remember that the art of community governance always involves treading in mystery.