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.
With their transparency, the Internet’s millions of online communities can be surveyed for
insights into their design and functioning. 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.
