{"id":873,"date":"2014-07-06T17:22:26","date_gmt":"2014-07-06T17:22:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/?page_id=873"},"modified":"2025-09-08T11:44:01","modified_gmt":"2025-09-08T19:44:01","slug":"professional","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/professional","title":{"rendered":"Seth Frey"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/dev_weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/unnamed_flippedlikecohen.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-2084\" src=\"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/dev_weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/unnamed_flippedlikecohen.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1416\" height=\"2124\" srcset=\"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/unnamed_flippedlikecohen.jpg 1416w, https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/unnamed_flippedlikecohen-200x300.jpg 200w, https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/unnamed_flippedlikecohen-768x1152.jpg 768w, https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/unnamed_flippedlikecohen-683x1024.jpg 683w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1416px) 100vw, 1416px\" \/><\/a><br \/>\nDr. Seth Frey is a computational social scientist and cognitive scientist who studies commons governance, collective action, and other complex social phenomena. He specializes in using online communities as model systems for emergent institutional and organizational phenomena. His expertise is in <strong>computational approaches to self-governance<\/strong> and the <strong>cognitive science of collective behavior<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>He is an associate professor in <a href=\"https:\/\/communication.ucdavis.edu\/people\/sethfrey\">Communication<\/a> at the University of California Davis, an affiliate of the <a href=\"https:\/\/ostromworkshop.indiana.edu\">Ostrom Workshop<\/a> at Indiana University, and a Research Director at <a href=\"https:\/\/metagov.org\">Metagov<\/a>. He was a behavioral economist at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.disneyresearch.com\/\">Disney Research<\/a> in Walt Disney Imagineering, and a complex systems scholar at <a href=\"https:\/\/necsi.edu\/\">NECSI<\/a>. Seth holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Informatics (complex systems) from Indiana University and a B.A. in Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley.<\/p>\n<p>Seth&#8217;s research has appeared in <em>PNAS<\/em>, <em>Nature Scientific Reports<\/em>, and <em>Proceedings of the Royal Society<\/em>. It has been covered in <em>The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine<\/em>, and<em> TEDx<\/em>. It has been funded by the <em>NSF, NASA<\/em>, and\u00a0the<em> Ford Foundation<\/em>.<\/p>\n<ul class=\"list-plain\">\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/scholar.google.com\/citations?hl=en&amp;user=DO4uc-kAAAAJ&amp;view_op=list_works&amp;sortby=pubdate\">Publications (Scholar)<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/enfascination.com\/htdocs\/SethFrey_CV_current.pdf\">CV (PDF)<\/a><\/li>\n<li>contact (email)\n<ul class=\"list-plain\">\n<li>professional: <em>the eight letters of Seth&#8217;s name at ucdavis.edu<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li>personal: <em>moctodliamg at the same thing backward<\/em>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--\n \t\n\n<li>Contact (professional): sethfrey+site@ucdavis.edu<\/li>\n\n\n--><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h3>Computational approaches to institutional analysis<\/h3>\n<p>&#8230; and, eventually, the science of helping them craft themselves.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_1289\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1289\" style=\"width: 300px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-1667\" src=\"http:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/1460732620-240x300.jpg\" alt=\"1460732620\" width=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/1460732620-240x300.jpg 240w, https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/1460732620.jpg 519w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 240px) 100vw, 240px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-1289\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/04\/17\/magazine\/the-minecraft-generation.html?_r=2\">\u2767<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p><strong>What is even harder than preventing the Tragedy of the Commons?<\/strong> <em>Preventing the Tragedy of the Commons in a population of cognitively immature and totally anonymous users.<\/em> That is how a online communities can advance our understanding of human cooperation and self-governance. Many online communities are owned and operated by the users themselves. These amateur administrators must overcome a bundle of collective action problems, including fostering activity, building trust, managing vandals, and paying for bandwidth. By evaluating the governance decisions of tens of thousands of such communities, we can develop a better understanding of effective social and institutional design. We can also support a generation of young people who are making themselves conversant in the art of designing healthy societies.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/journals.plos.org\/plosone\/article?id=10.1371\/journal.pone.0216335\"><em>PLOS ONE<\/em><\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/jq56\"><em>Nature Scientific Reports<\/em><\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/jq57\"><em>Entropy<\/em><\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/hackernoon.com\/bringing-big-data-to-the-science-of-community-minecraft-edition-jtqe3zxq\"><em>Hackernoon<\/em><\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/nytimes.com\/2016\/04\/17\/magazine\/the-minecraft-generation.html?_r=1\">Coverage in New York Times Magazine<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<hr \/>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-2700 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Untitled-2.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"2048\" height=\"1536\" srcset=\"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Untitled-2.png 2048w, https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Untitled-2-300x225.png 300w, https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Untitled-2-1024x768.png 1024w, https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Untitled-2-768x576.png 768w, https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Untitled-2-1536x1152.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2048px) 100vw, 2048px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>A science of self-governance will use policies as data. Why aren&#8217;t policies data? <\/strong><em>Recent advances in the institutional grammar framework are making it possible to extract an institutions structure from its written policies via NLP<\/em>. Work with Saba Siddiki and many others.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/cisl.info\">The Computational Institutional Science Lab<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/institutionalgrammar.org\">The Institutional Grammar Research Initiative<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/ghzpst\">Machine coding of policy texts<\/a> in <em>Public Administration<\/em>, with Saba Siddiki and others.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<hr \/>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-2701 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/02e438ab69202e25dee9c4d6386d726e.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"295\" height=\"500\" srcset=\"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/02e438ab69202e25dee9c4d6386d726e.jpg 295w, https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/02e438ab69202e25dee9c4d6386d726e-177x300.jpg 177w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 295px) 100vw, 295px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>How do we design participation into social systems? <\/strong><em>With guidance from thinkers like Vincent and Elinor Ostrom we get a clearer view into what goes wrong when you fail to design everyone into change processes.<\/em> Work includes analyses of Ethereum, Colorado&#8217;s cannabis monitoring backend, and the Minecraft server ecosystem.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;<em><a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/gwpb\">Effective voice: Beyond exit and affect in online communities<\/a><\/em>&#8221; in <em>New Media &amp; Society<\/em>, with Nathan Schneider.<\/li>\n<li><em><a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/3359134\">&#8220;This Place Does What It Was Built For&#8221;: Designing Digital Institutions for Participatory Change<\/a><\/em>. Work with Brian Keegan and Peaks Krafft. Honorable Mention Award for Best Paper at ACM CSCW 2019<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<hr \/>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-2696 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Screen-Shot-2023-10-18-at-14.40.37.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"622\" height=\"760\" srcset=\"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Screen-Shot-2023-10-18-at-14.40.37.png 622w, https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Screen-Shot-2023-10-18-at-14.40.37-246x300.png 246w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 622px) 100vw, 622px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>What would a Governance API look like? <\/strong><em>We propose a computational framework for designing governance systems for online communities.<\/em> We diverge from current work on governance by thinking bigger than token-based and other &#8220;mechanism design&#8221; style approaches to focus on the needs of truly and deeply democratic communities.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/j3vs\">Compositional Game Theory<\/a>, supporting Jules Hedges, Phillip Zahn, and Joshua Tan<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/gwvx\">Modular Politics<\/a>, with Nathan Schneider, Primavera de Filippi, Amy Zhang, and Joshua Tan at CSCW<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/metagov.org\">The Metagov Project<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<hr \/>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-2694 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Screen-Shot-2023-10-18-at-14.35.31.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"674\" height=\"1284\" srcset=\"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Screen-Shot-2023-10-18-at-14.35.31.png 674w, https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Screen-Shot-2023-10-18-at-14.35.31-157x300.png 157w, https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Screen-Shot-2023-10-18-at-14.35.31-538x1024.png 538w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 674px) 100vw, 674px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>What if you could take the Earth, make millions of copies with small tweaks, and replay history?<\/strong> <em>Answer: History, cultural theory, and even political philosophy would become sciences. And it&#8217;s possible today.<\/em> Disney World is a city of 40,000 people where every citizen gets amnesia once a week. Games, sports, theme parks, wikis, online communities: all of these are human engineered social systems that are easily replicable and offer complete data. They open the door to large-scale quantitative comparative analyses at the unit of analysis of the institution, and will be the main empirical method for the emerging science of self-governance.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;Org-scale analytics&#8221; on <a href=\"https:\/\/towardsdatascience.com\/org-scale-analytics-todays-startups-build-societies-do-it-right-4f6185e81482\"><em>Towards Data Science<\/em><\/a><\/li>\n<li>See my work on <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/jq57\">Minecraft<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/jq59\">World of Warcraft<\/a>, Wikipedia, and <a href=\"http:\/\/doi.org\/cwbz\">Club Penguin<\/a> for examples<\/li>\n<li>The 2017 <a href=\"https:\/\/sites.dartmouth.edu\/neukom\/counter-earth\/\">Science of Counter Earth<\/a> Workshop<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<hr \/>\n<h1 style=\"text-align: center;\"><em><a href=\"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/more-projects\">More projects<\/a><\/em><\/h1>\n<h3><\/h3>\n<hr \/>\n<h3>Personal<\/h3>\n<figure id=\"attachment_886\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-886\" style=\"width: 474px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-886 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/SethFreyHeadShot.png\" alt=\"3D scan \" width=\"474\" height=\"596\" srcset=\"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/SethFreyHeadShot.png 474w, https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/SethFreyHeadShot-238x300.png 238w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 474px) 100vw, 474px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-886\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">3D scan <a href=\"http:\/\/www.disneyresearch.com\/research-labs\/disney-research-zurich\/dr-zurich-capture-effects\/\">thanks to<\/a> Thabo Beeler and Derek Bradley of Disney Research<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Outside of research I break\/repair my bicycle, admire print design, and think about clear communication. I get inspiration from organizational, industrial, and institutional economics; political philosophy; old-school anthropology; animal behavior; statistical physics; and nature writing. I love people\u2019s fascinations (peculiar or not), and fixing things (broken or not).<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Related Posts generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dr. Seth Frey is a computational social scientist and cognitive scientist who studies commons governance, collective action, and other complex social phenomena. He specializes in using online communities as model systems for emergent institutional and organizational phenomena. His expertise is in computational approaches to self-governance and the cognitive science of collective behavior. He is an &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/professional\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Seth Frey<\/span><\/a><!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Related Posts generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"wpupg_custom_link":[],"wpupg_custom_link_behaviour":["default"],"wpupg_custom_image":[],"wpupg_custom_image_id":[],"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/873"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=873"}],"version-history":[{"count":173,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/873\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2996,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/873\/revisions\/2996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}