Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom: Governing the Commons is perhaps the most important work of Nobel prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom. It explores how communities are able to successfully manage common resources - and why these commons sometimes fall apart.

There is a lot of vital work being done by people of color, especially black women, explaining how human biases become embedded in technology. Their writing and research is a core motivator of this project. Some suggestions: Race After Technology by Ruha Benjamin, Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble, Coded Bias, a documentary about the work of Joy Buolamwini.

Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom by Jacob Levy: This book explores the political nature of groups and their tensions with individual freedoms and with the nations (and other types of larger structures) in which they’re embedded.

All Foundings Are Forced by Arthur Applbaum: A paper which questions how group structures derive their legitimacy.

Projects to Check Out

PolicyKit “empowers online community members to concisely author a wide range of governance procedures and automatically carry out those procedures on their home platforms”. It works with existing platforms such as Slack and Reddit to enhance the ability of communities on those platforms to self-govern. See this paper to learn more.

The FOSS Governance Colluction is a collection of various governance documents from free/open source projects maintained by VM (Vicky) Brasseur.

Polis is “a real-time system for gathering, analyzing and understanding what large groups of people think in their own words”.

Organizations & Communities

MetaGov is an interdisciplinary research collective focusing on digital self-governance. If you’re interested in joining, please reach out.

Enspiral: Based out of New Zealand but spanning the world, the Enspiral collective supports people who want to make the world a better place. They work together to build collaborative tools and processes to build their livelihoods together, for instance, their project Loomio helps groups collaborate online.