Related papers: PolicyKit: Building Governance in Online Communiti…
With the art and practice of government policy-making, public work, and citizen participation, many governments adopt information and communication technologies (ICT) as a vehicle to facilitate their relationship with citizens. This…
Online communities rely on a mix of platform policies and community-authored rules to define acceptable behavior and maintain order. However, these rules vary widely across communities, evolve over time, and are enforced inconsistently,…
This paper proposes a novel framework for representing community know-how on the Semantic Web. Procedural knowledge generated by web communities typically takes the form of natural language instructions or videos and is largely…
Managers regularly face a complex ethical dilemma over how to best govern online communities by evaluating the effectiveness of different social or technical strategies. What ethical considerations should guide researchers and managers when…
In this paper we argue that policies are an increasing concern for organizations that are operating a web site. Examples of policies that are relevant in the domain of the web address issues such as privacy of personal data, accessibility…
An important use of sensors and actuator networks is to comply with health and safety policies in hazardous environments. In order to deal with increasingly large and dynamic environments, and to quickly react to emergencies, tools are…
Providing functionalities that allow online social network users to manage in a secure and private way the publication of their information and/or resources is a relevant and far from trivial topic that has been under scrutiny from various…
Social media platforms face increasing scrutiny over the rapid spread of misinformation. In response, many have adopted community-based content moderation systems, including Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch) on X (formerly Twitter),…
Social influence drives both offline and online human behaviour. It pervades cultural markets, and manifests itself in the adoption of scientific and technical innovations as well as the spread of social practices. Prior empirical work on…
Technologies are increasingly enrolled in projects to involve civilians in the work of policy-making, often under the label of 'civic technology'. But conventional forms of participation through transactions such as voting provide limited…
We present CommentWatcher, an open source tool aimed at analyzing discussions on web forums. Constructed as a web platform, CommentWatcher features automatic mass fetching of user posts from forum on multiple sites, extracting topics,…
This paper addresses policy challenges of complex virtual environments such as virtual worlds, social network sites, and massive multiplayer online games. The complexity of these environments--apparent by the rich user interactions and…
AI tools are increasingly deployed in community contexts. However, datasets used to evaluate AI are typically created by developers and annotators outside a given community, which can yield misleading conclusions about AI performance. How…
In societal-scale decision-making systems the collective is faced with the problem of ensuring that the derived group decision is in accord with the collective's intention. In modern systems, political institutions have instatiated…
Understanding how online communities discuss and make sense of complex social issues is a central challenge in social media research, yet existing tools for large-scale discourse analysis are often closed-source, difficult to adapt, or…
Open Source Software (OSS) communities often resist regulation typical of traditional organizations. Yet formal governance systems are being increasingly adopted among communities, particularly through non-profit mentor foundations. Our…
Speaking or writing of political assemblies tends to evoke the action of people gathering to deliberate, or the spaces in which this deliberation might take place. One thing that is often overlooked, however, is the fact that these spaces…
Collaboration across institutional boundaries is widespread and increasing today. It depends on federations sharing data that often have governance rules or external regulations restricting their use. However, the handling of data…
We present PolicyCLOUD, a prototype for an extensible, serverless cloud-based system that supports evidence-based elaboration and analysis of policies. PolicyCLOUD allows flexible exploitation and management of policy-relevant dataflows by…
This paper describes the design and functionality of ConvoKit, an open-source toolkit for analyzing conversations and the social interactions embedded within. ConvoKit provides an unified framework for representing and manipulating…