Experimenting With Online Governance

To solve the problems they face, online communities adopt comprehensive governance methods including committees, boards, juries, and even more complex institutional logics. Helping these kinds of communities succeed will require categorizing best practices and creating toolboxes that fit the needs of specific communities. Beyond such applied uses, there is also a potential for an institutional logic itself to evolve, taking advantage of feedback provided by the fast pace and large ecosystem of online communication. Here, we outline an experimental strategy aiming at guiding and facilitating such an evolution. We first review the advantages of studying collective action using recent technologies for efficiently orchestrating massive online experiments. Research in this vein includes attempts to understand how behavior spreads, how cooperation evolves, and how the wisdom of the crowd can be improved. We then present the potential usefulness of developing virtual-world experiments with governance for improving the utility of social feedback. Such experiments can be used for improving community rating systems and monitoring (dashboard) systems. Finally, we present a framework for constructing large-scale experiments entirely in virtual worlds, aimed at capturing the complexity of governance dynamics, to empirically test outcomes of manipulating institutional logic.

Ocena społecznościowa jako element systemu zarządzania komentarzami użytkowników

The Community Rating as an Element of the Comments Managing System The two most important strategies of managing user generated content are premoderation and postmoderation. The community rating can be used as a supporting element of the postmoderation system. It has a crucial role in informational portals where the amount of readers and published comments is large, so professional moderators would have problem in finding all comments that should be deleted. In the moderation process the role of Internet users is growing – they not only comment, but also evaluate comments of other users. Here occurs a transition: from user generated content to user moderated content. The aim of presented paper is to indicate a place of the community rating in the system of postmoderation, on the example of chosen Polish informational portals.