I gave a talk last month arguing why online communities are strategic for social science. Thank you to Michael Bernstein and all the members of Stanford’s Human-Computer Interaction Group.
Abstract:
Online communities as model systems for commons governance
Seth Frey
The best citizens of a large-scale democracy are those who have built and broken several small ones to see how they work. By empowering people to build any kind of community together, the Internet has become a laboratory for self-governance experimentation. Groups who start online communities must overcome the challenges of recruiting finite resources around difficult common goals. Fortunately, they can draw on a growing range of support technologies, peer networks, and scholarship.
The work of our lab is to survey the Internet’s millions of online communities for insights into their governance. Looking at three large platforms for small self-governing online communities, we will pose several questions of institutional processes at the population level, as drawn from the literatures on common-pool resource management and institutional analysis and design.
