Local Governance Platforms: Roles and Relations of City Governments, Citizens, and Businesses

This article analyses the dynamics of local platform governance with special regard to the roles and relations of city governments, citizens, and local businesses. We approach the subject through five Finnish platforms in which city governments are actively involved. This multiple case study shows that city governments tend to adopt a facilitative and enabling role on the platforms. They seek to create value by utilizing skills, knowledge, and resources of local communities in different kinds of co-creation processes. Local platform governance brings added value to innovation and urban vitality by utilizing multiple roles of citizens, businesses, and other local stakeholders.

Decentralized platforms and human relationships

Purpose This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies. Design/methodology/approach This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context. Findings This research paper concentrates on three design dimensions surrounding the formation of robust platform ecosystems like Uber and Udemy, namely: governance decentralization, shared context, and engagement. All these contribute to embedding trust and connection to a platform, by facilitating human relationships forming through them. Knowledge sharing and collaboration are core facets of building-in ever-increasing layers of innovation, and at one extreme platform governance could be completely decentralized, although this risks destabilizing the benefits of the other facets. Managers can gain plenty of commitment by involving many actors in decisions, without leaving the platform like a ship without a rudder… directionless. Originality/value The briefing saves busy executives, strategists and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

“YouTube’s predator problem”: Platform moderation as governance-washing, and user resistance

YouTube experienced large-scale criticism in early 2019 for predatory behavior toward children on the platform. To address concerns about children’s safety, YouTube acted quickly by demonetizing and deactivating comments on videos featuring minors. In this paper, we analyze both the company’s response to this scandal and how users received that response. We argue that YouTube’s reaction was governance-washing, which presents the appearance of vigorous platform moderation and leverages popular perceptions of technology to create the look of authority while deflecting questions about substance. While YouTubers and users did not dispute that the pedophilic comments were heinous, they questioned the effectiveness of the company’s solutions, arguing that YouTube’s platform governance actions did not solve the problem. Ultimately, we show that users have cogent critiques of governance policies that pretend to be comprehensive but fail to solve what they purport to address, and offer up the term “governance-washing” as a useful framework to make sense of such cases.

Alustat paikallisen hallinnan välineenä – käsitteellinen tarkastelu

The concept of platform, its connotations and relationship with local governance The aim of this article is to shed light on the relevance of platforms in urban governance. Discussion starts with a brief description of the evolution of platform discourse and a critical view of how platforms relate to governance paradigms. As the idea of platform is often associated with openness and participation, this particular dimension is elaborated as a potentially beneficial feature of platform governance. In order to concretize the picture of platforms in the given context, this article presents a typology of urban platforms based on the most common platform functions. Our discussion reveals that while platforms have a connection with classic modes of governance, they have irreducible features worth acknowledging in the theorization of public governance. The type of platform, the level of analysis and social structures are preconditions for understanding the platform logic in urban governance.

Software platform owners' entry and application developers' innovations: a conceptual model

PurposeThe primary aim of this article is to develop an understanding that resolves and integrates the conflicting findings with regard to the effects of platform-owner entry on the innovation of individual complementors.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on the platform ecosystem literature and the profiting from innovation (PFI) framework, this study presents a conceptual model that articulates how developers' marketing capabilities and the size of platform's installed base are two key moderators that explain the conflicting results between platform-owner entry and complementor innovations.FindingsThis article theorizes that platform owners' entry stimulates developers' innovations when the size of platform's installed base is large or when developers' marketing capabilities are strong while the entry can discourage innovations otherwise.Originality/valueBy proposing the conceptual model, this article makes important theoretical contributions to the rising literature on platform governance and complementor innovations. It lays a foundation for future research exploring the implications of platform-owner entry.

FROM BUZZFEED CREATOR TO (IN)DEPENDENT YOUTUBER - MANAGING PRECARIOUS LABOUR THROUGH GOSSIP

Several known Buzzfeed Creators have left the company’s toxic culture by beginning a career as YouTubers. They hoped that their Buzzfeed audience would migrate to support their company-independent channel. Often represented as a move towards independence by creators, cultural production research (Nieborg & Poell, 2018; Burgess et al. 2020) has shown that creators are platform and audience dependent for viability. Therefore, we are questioning whether being an (in)dependent YouTuber would be more precarious than being an employed Buzzfeed creator. How does the migration from Buzzfeed to YouTube creator offer both independence and a host of new contingencies? Situating a content and discourse analysis of “Why I left Buzzfeed” YouTube videos and comments within academic and popular discourse, we understand these videos as sources of ‘gossip’ (Bishop, 2018) defined as “loose, unmethodological talk that is generative” (2590). Gossip can be beneficial to ex-Buzzfeed creators building on their Buzzfeed association to boost algorithmic visibility. Additionally, gossip is a valuable form of knowledge exchange for content creators to stay informed on discourse, support one another, and communicate their perspective on former Buzzfeed content. Gossip also allows us as researchers to break through the blackbox of YouTube content creation to better comprehend precarity as multifaceted. We hypothesize that creators have to balance different aspects of precarity depending on Buzzfeed as employer or YouTube as distributor. The imaginary of independence is a false friend as both employed and self-employed creators are dependent on platform governance and their platform public (Mniestri & Gekker, 2020) for success.

THE GOVERNANCE OF FACEBOOK PLATFORM

Competition authorities and regulators worldwide recognise application programming interfaces (APIs) for powering the digital economy and driving processes of datafication and platformisation. However, it is unclear how APIs tie into the power of, and governance by, large digital platforms. This paper traces the relationality between Facebook’s APIs, platform governance, and data strategy based on an empirical and evolutionary analysis. It examines a large corpus of (archived) developer pages and API reference documentation to determine the technicity of platform governance – the technical dimension and dynamics of how and what platforms like Facebook seek to govern. It traces how Facebook Platform evolved into a complex layered and interconnected governance arrangement, wherein technical API specifications serve to enforce (changes to) platform policy and (data) strategy. Finally, the paper discusses the significance of this technicity in specifying the material conditions for app and business development on top of platforms and for maintaining infrastructural and evolutive power over their ecosystems.