Governance Layers: Meet CommunityRule and PolicyKit

The Metagovernance Project is seeking to make flexible, creative governance a standard feature in contexts such as social media, multiplayer games, and open-source projects. In this workshop, Metagov researchers will present hands-on, early-stage experiments that offer glimpses into how networks of user-generated, interconnected governance processes might look and feel. CommunityRule is a webapp for generating and sharing basic governance documents for informal groups, being piloted in open source and Covid mutual aid efforts. PolicyKit embeds governance processes in Reddit and Slack communities.

SPEAKERS Nathan Schneider is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Enterprise Design Lab. He is the author of Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy, published by Nation Books, and two previous books, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet and Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse, both published by University of California Press. His articles have appeared in publications including Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and others, along with regular columns for America, a national Catholic weekly. He has lectured at universities including Columbia, Fordham, Harvard, MIT, NYU, the University of Bologna, and Yale. In 2015, he co-organized “Platform Cooperativism,” a pioneering conference on democratic online platforms at The New School, and co-edited the subsequent book, Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet. Follow his work on social media at @ntnsndr or at his website, nathanschneider.info.

Amy X. Zhang is a fall 2020 incoming assistant professor at University of Washington’s Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. She is currently doing a 1-year postdoc in the Computer Science Department of Stanford University after just finishing her Ph.D. at MIT CSAIL. She is also a current affiliate and 2018-19 Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. She is a founding member of the Credibility Coalition, a group dedicated to research and standards for information credibility online. She has interned at Microsoft Research and Google Research. Her work has received a best paper award at ACM CSCW, a best paper honorable mention award at ACM CHI, and has been profiled on BBC’s Click television program, CBC radio, and featured in articles by ABC News, The Verge, New Scientist, and Poynter. She received an M.Phil. in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge on a Gates Fellowship and a B.S. in Computer Science at Rutgers University, where she was captain of the Division I Women’s tennis team. Her Ph.D. research was supported by a Google PhD Fellowship and an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.