Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life

The goal shouldn’t be to recreate offline governance, online, after a period of trial-and-error. Internet-native organizations can’t and shouldn’t operate like geographic governments because they don’t face the same constraints. Once online governance models evolve past a certain point, they should be both different from and superior to offline one... See more

There are many projects that have created protocols for decentralizing discourse, including ActivityPub and SSB for social, Matrix and IRC for chat, and RSS for blogging. While each of these are successful in their own right, none of them fully met the goals we had for a network that enables global long-term public conversations at scale. 

The Internet has so far forgotten the bias for democracy that long reigned among offline clubs, public companies, and other associations. How can the Internet catch up to my mother’s garden club—or, even better, enable a new renaissance in creative self-governance?

The Internet can enable much more than just a return to regimes of bylaws and boards.... See more