Dialogues/Complexities of Community Governance

Complexities of Community Governance

Please read the Virtual Event Code of Conduct. We will be recording the event presentations, but not discussions.

This event will take place September 27, 2024 at 12pm to 2pm CT. It will feature Professor Seth Frey (University of California Davis) and Sohyeon Hwang (Northwestern University). Register now!

Community governance often involves aligning people, goals, and tools. But communities also face added constraints—including the systems and values of other people they want to interact with (or avoid). Often, communities are obliged or encouraged to adopt norms or processes from platforms, networks, or meta-communities with which they are connected. How can communities navigate these challenges? This session will explore how communities self-govern amidst competing pressures in complex, multi-layered environments.

Sohyeon Hwang (Northwestern) will discuss how instances on the Fediverse develop and maintain norms about privacy community admins mediate expectations about how members’ content spreads across the network, often encountering tensions of trust and friction. Although instances can adopt policy and technical settings that impact privacy, they must both communicate these decisions and handle misalignments with decisions made in other instances they are federated with. This work, based on new interview data and co-authored with Priyanka Nanayakkara and Yan Shvartzshnaider, suggests how community practices enabling information flows within and between communities can support autonomy and privacy.

Seth Frey (UC Davis) will discuss work led by Mahasweta Chakraborti on the relationship between formal governance and governance in practice, as evident in the prominent open source software development communities of the Apache Software Foundation. Drawing on computational text analysis of several policies and hundreds of thousands of public email discussions, this work reveals that communities are not necessarily more successful when they give more attention or demonstrate more alignment to the governed subjects that attract the most detailed policy. This work should provide a nice launching point for discussing the role of formal rules in community success.

This event is organized by the CDSC and hosted and supported, in part, by a National Science Foundation grant (IIS-2045055) so that it will be held at no cost to attendees. A code of conduct will be shared with participants prior to the event. Discussions will be held under Chatham House Rule. Presentations will be recorded, though discussions will not.

What is a Dialogue?

The Science of Community Dialogue Series is a series of conversations between researchers, experts, community organizers, and other people who are interested in how communities work, collaborate, and succeed. You can watch this short introduction video with Aaron Shaw.

What is the CDSC?

The Community Data Science Collective (CDSC) is an interdisciplinary research group made of up of faculty and students at the University of Washington Department of Communication, the Northwestern University Department of Communication Studies, the Carleton College Computer Science Department, and the Purdue University School of Communication.

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