PolicyKit: Building Governance in Online Communities
This addresses the need for flexible governance in online communities, enabling non-technical members to implement complex procedures without manual effort, though it is incremental as it builds on existing political science theory.
The authors tackled the problem of limited governance models in online community platforms by developing PolicyKit, a software infrastructure that allows community members to author and automate diverse governance procedures, demonstrating its expressivity through implementations like random jury deliberation and Wikipedia's RfA process.
The software behind online community platforms encodes a governance model that represents a strikingly narrow set of governance possibilities focused on moderators and administrators. When online communities desire other forms of government, such as ones that take many members' opinions into account or that distribute power in non-trivial ways, communities must resort to laborious manual effort. In this paper, we present PolicyKit, a software infrastructure that empowers online community members to concisely author a wide range of governance procedures and automatically carry out those procedures on their home platforms. We draw on political science theory to encode community governance into policies, or short imperative functions that specify a procedure for determining whether a user-initiated action can execute. Actions that can be governed by policies encompass everyday activities such as posting or moderating a message, but actions can also encompass changes to the policies themselves, enabling the evolution of governance over time. We demonstrate the expressivity of PolicyKit through implementations of governance models such as a random jury deliberation, a multi-stage caucus, a reputation system, and a promotion procedure inspired by Wikipedia's Request for Adminship (RfA) process.