Governance

understand governance to be the process of aligning diverse interests among people who share common goals, and preserving that overall alignment even when some interests diverge

in this session, we'll share a specific understanding from Elinor Ostrom - Governing the Commons, Governing Knowledge as a Commons

(mis)understanding tragedy of the commons – cliche: "if we share a field, everyone will take as many cows as they each can to the field and these self-interested actions will destroy the field...

therefore we must privitize the field or outlaw use of it"

Ostrom showed communities can and have developed many kinds of mechanisms to protect "the field" – won a Nobel in economics for disproving the assumption that sharing things is not possible "if it can work in practice, it can work in theory"

good primer in this podcast: https://deepcast.fm/episode/235-the-imaginary-tragedy-of-the-hypothetical-commons

principles from Ostom:

1. boundaries - what and who?
2. fair agreements - fair for the people and locally appropriate for the resource and context
3. collective choice rules - rules for making the rules, in which people need to be able to participate. critically this is a participatory process. (this principle is at a different level of abstraction from others)
4. monitoring - how is it going? what's happening within the boundaries, what's happening with the resource, how are we sharing that information?
5. sanctions - (graduated sanctions that scale in appropriateness and severity), can be positive or negative reprecussions
6. conflict resolution - affordable and accessible. we need means for everyone to have access processes of mediation
7. government allows it - the state needs to permit you to do this, if otherwise the state will force you to shut down or punish you
8. nestedness (subsidiarity) / matroshka, fractal, federation, polycentricity (example river caretaking, can be whole river, watershed, tributary, etc) - different levels of care taking and coordination between the scales. this can reflect why social change is so hard, because actors at different scales and in different areas. decicions should be made at the most locally appripriate level. you need feedback loops to escalate and modify the different levels

Ostrom says these are characteristics that tend to be present in systems that don't fail, and when systems fail you can usually find something here that fails. but it's not prescriptive for success; you can do all these things and fail, you can miss something and not fail... it's a frame for analyis.

formality/ informality

• the jargon for #2 is rules, but it's very hard to talk to people in open source about having rules because they eschew rules in general
• but, when you drill down and ask how people do their work, there are plenty of examples of norms at least, and even some rules that maybe they just don't call rules
• as systems grow, they tend to evolve from norms to rules
  • as you scale in size you need more formality
• the art is finding the minimally viable governance
  • consistency and boundaries
• draw normative boundaries, this allows you to conceptually draw values and get people on the same page
• when you don't write down the values, you get conflict and misunderstanding
• what is the thing you want to do, who are the people you are trying to serve and what is it you are trying to do
• difference of digital resources
• how to you move from informal to formal drawing boundaries
  • should start with values
  • people will interpret values differently
• before you do the rest, you need to have values
  • (loosely) values are the things we stand for/ moving towards, and principles are the practice
• allied media principles
  • we beging by listening
• commons are never one thing (not just the field or water or signage, etc) they are layered, they are fractal and relational
  • labor is just one component of the resource
  • code is also a resource, brand is another, mailing lists are a resource, etc

how does ownership and want of ownership interact with this from the ground up how do I think about this

• how much should we think about this before starting

when heavilied siloed it's very hard to get linkages between groups

you are never quite starting from scratch

• there is some context for starting and how does it relate to the things around it
• academics tend not to tell you how to start something, but rather point to examples

when you talk to the people around you and take notes and move forward and then you iterate that process

example: research stage for making a social network

• chicken and egg of making the community and governance
• want to give power but there's a lot needed to get buy in
• what is the minimally viable thing that has some of the logic of the big picture, and then we iterate
• centralized vs decentralized - instead, think that what can/ should be either?

dev summit is a great example - there is some centralized authority and then spread to a decentralized process

questions around definitionality of commons vs other kinds of governance differences in thinking in early digital days due to scarcity thinking in physical world trust is a resource, good faith is a resource that is vulnerable

• give ourselves grace

different kinds of rules

• operational rules - who can do what
• collective choice rules - rules about how the rules are made, ie consensus, Robert's Rules
• Constitutional rules - rules that determine who gets to determine the rules, ie, how is the board of directors established

pitfalls of running straight into adopting bylaws or governance structure

• do we have to build things from scratch
• it's an art and artists steal
• https://communityrule.info/
• biomimicry - use something that already exists
• that said – the process of arriving to the agreement is almost as important as the agreement itself
• how do we ritually examine and look at what we're doing
• reflection allows self ownership, we made these decisions and now look at where we are

US government modeled after Iroquois nation

• regional governance model for local representation in federated system
• matriarchal power dispatching male delegates

how to split the difference between Ostrom talking about how hard this is, and "YAY THE COMMONS!" boosterism – we need practical guides for tough decisionmaking

• • it takes time to*internalize this kind of stuff, but then it seems obvious. Can we help people skip past the learning curve, and start applying the principles without needing to learn the jargon?

Principles of Open Source Institutional Design

• QAF - questions to ask frequently

• https://sustainoss.pubpub.org/pub/jqngsp5u