Related papers: Designing for Participation and Change in Digital …
Building a successful community means governing active populations and limited resources. This challenge often requires communities to design formal governance systems from scratch. But the characteristics of successful institutional…
Governance in online communities is an increasingly high-stakes challenge, and yet many basic features of offline governance legacies--juries, political parties, term limits, and formal debates, to name a few--are not in the feature-sets of…
The integration of agential artificial intelligence into socioeconomic systems requires us to reexamine the evolutionary processes that describe changes in our economic institutions. This article synthesizes three frameworks: multi-level…
Understanding online communities requires an appreciation of both structure and culture. But basic questions remain difficult to pose. How do these facets interact and drive each other? Using data on the membership and governance styles of…
Participatory design initiatives, especially within the realm of digital civics, are often integrated and co-developed with the very citizens and communities they intend to assist. Digital civics research aims to create positive social…
Public confidence in democratic institutions has declined across many OECD countries over recent decades, while political participation and policy influence remain unevenly distributed across socioeconomic groups. Concurrently, democratic…
Deliberative democracy depends on carefully designed institutional frameworks, such as participant selection, facilitation methods, and decision-making mechanisms, that shape how deliberation performs. However, identifying optimal…
Participatory design in digital civics aims to foster mutual learning and co-creation between public services and citizens. However, rarely do we collectively explore the challenges and failures we experience within PD and digital civics,…
Motivation - This research aims at investigating emerging roles and forms of participation fostering design-use mediation during the Open Source Software design process Research approach - We compare online interactions for a successful…
Institutions and cultures evolve adaptively in response to the current environmental incentives, usually. But sometimes institutional change is due to stochastic drives beyond current fitness, including drift, path dependency, blind…
The challenging task of embedding innovative participatory processes and technologies within local government often falls upon local council officers. Using qualitative data collection and analysis, we investigate the ongoing work of…
Generative AI is rapidly reshaping STEM higher education. Not only are our educational practices changing, but how we think about educational transformation must adapt. Existing models of institutional change in STEM, aimed at interactive…
Open source software (OSS) sustainability depends not only on code contributions but also on governance structures that define who decides, who acts, and how responsibility is distributed. We lack systematic empirical evidence of how…
Online discourse takes place in corporate-controlled spaces thought by users to be public realms. These platforms in name enable free speech but in practice implement varying degrees of censorship either by government edict or by uneven and…
Social media platforms have become critical infrastructures for public communication, where large-scale interaction can both support socially beneficial collective pressure and amplify polarization and conflict. While opinion-dynamics…
Many have criticized the centralized and unaccountable governance of prominent online social platforms, leading to renewed interest in platform governance that incorporates multiple centers of power. Decentralization of power can arise…
This paper introduces Democracy-in-Silico, an agent-based simulation where societies of advanced AI agents, imbued with complex psychological personas, govern themselves under different institutional frameworks. We explore what it means to…
Communication technologies contain embedded values that affect our society's fundamental values, such as privacy, freedom of speech, and the protection of intellectual property. Researchers have shown the design of technologies is not…
Growing interest and investment in the capabilities of foundation models has positioned such systems to impact a wide array of public services. Alongside these opportunities is the risk that these systems reify existing power imbalances and…
The global introduction of affordable Internet of Things (IoT) devices offers an opportunity to empower a large variety of users with different needs. However, many off-the-shelf digital products are still not widely adopted by people who…