Governable Spaces, Session 3
Hello CoSocial Readers! Looking forward to our session this week. See below for agenda, including some questions for reflection and possible discussion.
Agenda
Announcements (5 minutes)
- See CoSocial code of conduct. Also open to proposals for additional reading group rules.
- Invite to enable video. No recording and no transcription in use.
- Notes file shared in chat with read/write permissions for everyone. Plan to post notes publicly after this session on CoSocial Discourse General Discussions
- Invite to add name and/or handle to notes file
- Goal is for notes capture the discussion, excluding who says what
- Need a volunteer to take notes
Introductions (10 minutes)
Discussion (60 minutes)
- Initial thoughts or impressions of these chapters?
4. Governable Stacks, Organizing against Digital Colonialism
- Schneider defines Governable stacks as the continuous design of layered and interconnected infrastructure and practices that enable self-governance, central to resistance against digital colonialism.
- What do you think of this strategy? How can pursuing this strategy be expected to benefit individuals/groups/organizations?
- Modular politics is a governance design model for online spaces, described as the basis of an emerging governance layer for the internet.
- Are there organizational barriers to experimenting with governance design? How can these be addressed?
- Governance archaeology is the work of filling governable stacks with lessons from ancestors across diverse times and places. It draws inspiration from David Graeber and David Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything”. Decolonial theorist Catherine Walsh puts it as “a past capable of renovating the future."
- What can we do to inform ourselves and collaborate in this process?
5. Governable Spaces, Democracy as a Policy Strategy
- Schnieder writes on p. 107 "Governable spaces arise when social and technical infrastructures enable participants to deliberate, make decisions, and enact those decisions through accessible, transparent, and just processes. To the extent that systems of rules organize our societies, governable spaces are difficult to achieve without policies that are well suited for supporting them.
- What government support would you see as helpful to this end?
- And on p. 112 “Under policy that expects governable spaces, social networks would have incentives to design for healthy self-governance. They would have to provide for users something on the order of modular politics—tools that support a variety of participatory mechanisms for rule-making and administration, such as elections, petitions, boards, and juries.”
- How could such a policy change the social media landscape?
Epilogue, Metagovernance
- On p. 128 “Governable spaces are steps into possible futures, starting with the connective networks that are already now among us.” and leaves us with “Governable spaces are a starting point for becoming, together, more fully ourselves.”
- Final thoughts?
Feedback (10 minutes)
- Governable stacks working group
- Next book recommendations
- What works and what can be improved