Suchergebnisse

Online communities provide ample opportunities for user self-expression but generally lack the means for average users to exercise direct control over community policies. This article sets out to identify a set of strategies and techniques through which the voices of participants might be better heard through defined mechanisms for institutional governance. Drawing on Albert O. Hirschman's distinction between "exit" and "voice" in institutional life, it introduces a further distinction between two kinds of participation: effective voice, as opposed to the far more widespread practices of affective voice. Effective voice is a form of individual or collective speech that brings about a binding effect according to transparent processes. Platform developers and researchers might explore this neglected form of voice by introducing mechanisms for authority and accountability, collective action, and community evolution.

Most aspects of our lives are governed by large, highly developed institutions that integrate several governance tasks under one authority structure. But theorists differ as to the mechanisms that drive the development of such concentrated governance systems from rudimentary beginnings. Is the emergence of integrated governance schemes a symptom of consolidation of authority by small status groups? Or does integration occur because a complex institution has more potential responses to a complex environment? Here we examine the emergence of complex governance regimes in 5,000 sovereign, resource-constrained, self-governing online communities, ranging in scale from one to thousands of users. Each community begins with no community members and no governance infrastructure. As communities grow, they are subject to selection pressures that keep better managed servers better populated. We identify predictors of community success and test the hypothesis that governance complexity can enhance community fitness. We find that what predicts success depends on size: changes in complexity predict increased success with larger population servers. Specifically, governance rules in a large successful community are more numerous and broader in scope. They also tend to rely more on rules that concentrate power in administrators, and on rules that manage bad behavior and limited server resources. Overall, this work is consistent with theories that formal integrated governance systems emerge to organize collective responses to interdependent resource management problems, especially as factors such as population size exacerbate those problems. ; ISSN:1932-6203

To solve the problems they face, online communities adopt comprehensive governance methods including committees, boards, juries, and even more complex institutional logics. Helping these kinds of communities succeed will require categorizing best practices and creating toolboxes that fit the needs of specific communities. Beyond such applied uses, there is also a potential for an institutional logic itself to evolve, taking advantage of feedback provided by the fast pace and large ecosystem of online communication. Here, we outline an experimental strategy aiming at guiding and facilitating such an evolution. We first review the advantages of studying collective action using recent technologies for efficiently orchestrating massive online experiments. Research in this vein includes attempts to understand how behavior spreads, how cooperation evolves, and how the wisdom of the crowd can be improved. We then present the potential usefulness of developing virtual-world experiments with governance for improving the utility of social feedback. Such experiments can be used for improving community rating systems and monitoring (dashboard) systems. Finally, we present a framework for constructing large-scale experiments entirely in virtual worlds, aimed at capturing the complexity of governance dynamics, to empirically test outcomes of manipulating institutional logic.

AbstractThe Institutional Grammar (IG) is used to analyse the syntactic structure of statements constituting institutions (e.g., policies, regulations, and norms) that indicate behavioural constraints and parameterize features of institutionally governed domains. Policy and administration scholars have made considerable progress in methodologically developing the IG, offering increasingly clear guidelines for IG‐based coding, identifying unique considerations for applying the IG to different types of institutions, and expanding its syntactic scope. However, while validated as a robust institutional analysis approach, the resource and time commitment associated with its application has precipitated concerns over whether the IG might ever enjoy widespread use. Needed now in the methodological development of the IG are reliable and accessible (i.e., open source) approaches that reduce the costs associated with its application. We propose an automated approach leveraging computational text analysis and natural language processing. We then present results from an evaluation in the context of food system regulations.