Community Driven Governance Online: Past, Present, and Future
Summary
The Social Media Governance Initiative is hosting a one day workshop entitled “Community Driven Governance Online: Past, Present, and Future”. Housed at the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School. Matt Katsaros (Director, SMGI), Sudhir Venkatesh (SIGNAL Lab, Columbia University), and Joseph Seering (Stanford University HCI Group), will host this one-day virtual gathering on Friday, November 12th, 2021. The forum will discuss approaches to online governance which put communities at the center of governance structures, providing community members tools, training, and systems to build communities and self-govern.
Approach
During the workshop, we will consider the history of these community driven governance models that reach back to the emergence of the internet to understand how those early governance models are shaping the approaches being used today. We will contrast these “bottom up” approaches with the more familiar “top down”, platform-driven governance structures seen on many large social media platforms and we will explore models that exist at the intersection of the two. Our workshop aims to discuss both the theories and perspectives underlying community governance online, and the tools, designs, and approaches that practitioners from platforms to philanthropy to policymaking can use to encourage prosocial community building online.
In this workshop, we will explore some of the following topics:
Historical approaches to user-driven governance
Modern developments in community moderation
Relationships between volunteer moderators and platform policy teams
Volunteer moderation and vulnerable communities
Issues of labor in community moderation
Our objectives are to bring together leaders invested in shaping the future direction of research, practice, and training in online community moderation. A full schedule of the day’s events can be found here.
While the full workshop is closed to the public, one of the sessions, a “Master Class with Dacher Keltner”, will be live-streamed and open for anyone to view and participate. You can register for this live-streamed event taking place November 12th from 1:30-2:30pm ET using this link.
Schedule
Researchers
Williams B. Ransford Professor of Sociology, Columbia University
Director of the Social Media Governance Initiative
Joseph Seering
Postdoctoral scholar in Computer Science at Stanford University