Metagovernance: A Governance Layer for Online Communities

The tools for governance in most online communities are inadequate to support basic processes used in offline groups, such as basic elections, term limits, and grievance processes. The Metagovernance Project (metagov.org) is a research group working to change this by building infrastructure to support online governance. This session will present Modular Politics, an ambitious computational governance framework intended to operate across diverse platforms, from social networks to multiplayer games.

Speakers

Joshua Tan is currently a doctoral student in computer science at Oxford studying under Samson Abramsky and Bob Coecke; previously, he completed my master’s in pure math at the Courant Institute at NYU, where his research involved applications of geometry and topology to artificial intelligence. For his thesis, he’s been exploring different ways of applying category theory and sheaf theory to computational learning theory, from work on the sample compression conjecture to diversity measures in boosting. His interests include category theory, computational learning theory, sheaf theory, robotics, and art history.

Seth Frey is data scientist and behavioral scientist who specializes in institutional approaches to self-governance and collective action online. He is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of California, Davis. Before that, he was in the behavioral economics group at Disney Research, a part of Walt Disney Imagineering, where he used engineered social systems like web team sports, theme parks, video games, and economic games to study sociality. He earned his bachelor’s at UC Berkeley and his Ph.D., in “Cognitive Science and Informatics,” at Indiana University in 2013.