Upward mobility
“Societies and platforms flourish when there is a path for everyone to have upward mobility, achieve financial security, and learn and grow. The beautiful thing is, in the real world as well as in the digital world, it’s up to us to build this path.”
— Li Jin
From Instant Pot to Instagram: Critical Lessons in Startup Community Building
Most aspects of our lives are governed by large, highly developed institutions that integrate several governance tasks under one authority structure. But theorists differ as to the mechanisms that drive the development of such concentrated governance systems from rudimentary beginnings. Is the emergence of integrated governance schemes a symptom of consolidation of authority by small status groups? Or does integration occur because a complex institution has more potential responses to a complex environment? Here we examine the emergence of complex governance regimes in 5,000 sovereign, resource-constrained, self-governing online communities, ranging in scale from one to thousands of users. Each community begins with no community members and no governance infrastructure. As communities grow, they are subject to selection pressures that keep better managed servers better populated. We identify predictors of community success and test the hypothesis that governance complexity can enhance community fitness. We find that what predicts success depends on size: changes in complexity predict increased success with larger population servers. Specifically, governance rules in a large successful community are more numerous and broader in scope. They also tend to rely more on rules that concentrate power in administrators, and on rules that manage bad behavior and limited server resources. Overall, this work is consistent with theories that formal integrated governance systems emerge to organize collective responses to interdependent resource management problems, especially as factors such as population size exacerbate those problems.
Emergence of integrated institutions in a large population of self-governing communities
Most aspects of our lives are governed by large, highly developed institutions that integrate several governance tasks under one authority structure. But theorists differ as to the mechanisms that drive the development of such concentrated governance systems from rudimentary beginnings. Is the emergence of integrated governance schemes a symptom of consolidation of authority by small status groups? Or does integration occur because a complex institution has more potential responses to a complex environment? Here we examine the emergence of complex governance regimes in 5,000 sovereign, resource-constrained, self-governing online communities, ranging in scale from one to thousands of users. Each community begins with no community members and no governance infrastructure. As communities grow, they are subject to selection pressures that keep better managed servers better populated. We identify predictors of community success and test the hypothesis that governance complexity can enhance community fitness. We find that what predicts success depends on size: changes in complexity predict increased success with larger population servers. Specifically, governance rules in a large successful community are more numerous and broader in scope. They also tend to rely more on rules that concentrate power in administrators, and on rules that manage bad behavior and limited server resources. Overall, this work is consistent with theories that formal integrated governance systems emerge to organize collective responses to interdependent resource management problems, especially as factors such as population size exacerbate those problems.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0216335
https://glimmersreport.net/report
Glimmers has been a real-time investigation into the relationship between civil society and technology in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
So here’s the thing: if we don’t cover how tech, innovation, and access to digital ecosystems is showing up in communities and among those traditionally overlooked, what we are saying is that their contributions don’t count.
— Sherrell Dorsey (@Sherrell_Dorsey) May 17, 2020
We fail to share complete pictures of society.
I saw a hitchhiker standing on the side of road, and as I drove past I thought I should pick them up. A couple of miles down the road I remembered the quote that “we are all just guiding each other home”, so I turned around and went back to pick them up.
Younis was a German masters student studying Quantum Physics and was in the UK to attend a lecture on his particular area of study. I told him about mountainboarding and that I was going to a Mountainboard Centre to practice the procedures we use for running competitions. He’d never heard of mountainboarding but asked if he could come with me.
At the Mountainboard Centre the other mountainboarders welcomed Younis without a moment of hesitation, mistrust or doubt. As soon as he stepped into our world he was immediately a brother of ours and was treated that way. He was given food from the barbecue, taught how to mountainboard, and given a place to sleep for the night and the promise of a lift the next day.
That’s what I love about the mountainboarding community.