Modular Politics: Toward a Governance Layer for Online Communities

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 Design, 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, the paper argues for enabling platform operators and their users to build bottom-up governance processes from computational components that are modular, 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 come to occur as a ubiquitous network layer. To that end, this paper proposes the development of an open standard for networked governance.