Collaborative Governance

CommunityRule is a tool that helps make communities better by providing a central place where people can create and share governance designs for their communities. It offers nine simple templates for setting up community structures. Communities can follow, modify, or even decide not to use these templates. They are meant...

Background Last year, Smart Contract Research Forum provided a grant to CommunityRule, an open-source Web app led by MEDLab at CU Boulder meant to serve as an interface for community governance design. The project was led by Deacon Rodda at SQGLZ , and I have already shared Deacon’s brilliant reflections...

In February, we announced an open call for Sacred Stacks, an invitation to " Bring Decentralized Tools to Your Community ." We were astonished by the response. Around fifty communities applied for only three available slots. Clearly, there is a widespread need and curiosity for support in exploring emerging technologies...

CommunityRule is a Web app we've been building at MEDLab to help communities design, edit, and share their own governance systems. You can think about it as an effort to re-think the idea of bylaws in an Internet-native way. It's something that could be useful for all kinds of virtual...

Modpol is a self-governance toolkit for communities in online worlds. We are creating the first implementation in a multiplayer game called Minetest . Consider a group of friends meeting for a picnic in the park. How do they make decisions, such as where to lay down their blanket, or when...

MEDlab is proud to launch Excavations: Governance Archaeology for the Future of the Internet , an online art exhibition and discursive space, exploring the future of the Internet through the past and present of human self-governance. It has resulted from the collaboration spanning the last six months of an artist...

This post was originally written for the Smart Contract Research Forum and is cross-posted there . The user experience for most organizational governance is pretty lousy. In meatspace, it generally consists of impenetrable legal prose that, in order to be precise, loses meaning for most people who have to use...

Download here Creating communities has never been easier. Online social networks enable groups to form among people who might never otherwise meet—across borders, even within neighborhoods, and around common causes that might otherwise remain isolated and underground. Getting involved in a community can be as easy as pressing “join.” But...

Image source: Questions and Answers - Audel’s New Electric Library (1938). Scan is courtesy of the Media Archaeology Lab . MEDlab is pleased to announce that the Excavations: Governance Archaeology for the Future of the Internet cohort has formed. Initiated by MEDlab and King’s College London, the cohort will facilitate...

A multimodal conversation Image source: Questions and Answers - Audel’s New Electric Library (1938). Scan is courtesy of the Media Archaeology Lab . After a full year of almost every facet of life porting online, the stakes of governing online communities and infrastructures have never been higher. As a contribution...