about.md 3.9 KB
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Purpose
Too many of our communities, especially online, adopt default governance practices based on top-down "implicit feudalism"—relying on admins or moderators, lacking even basic features of small-scale democracy. The purpose of CommunityRule is to help communities establish democratic norms for decision-making, stewardship, and culture.
This is a very preliminary prototype. Its eventual purpose is to do for governance what the Contributor Covenant has done for shared norms—enable simple, drag-and-drop adoption of common-sense community tools. Since communities have diverse governance needs, however, a one-size-fits-all approach will not suffice. The goal is for communities to easily and intuitively design governance systems appropriate to their contexts.
CommunityRule is a project of the Media Enterprise Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, in collaboration with the Metagovernance Project.
Contributors
Anyone who finds this project useful, or potentially so, is welcome to contribute suggestions, changes, and additions. To do so, post Issues and Merge Requests to the project on GitLab, or send an email to medlab@colorado.edu.
Stewardship
CommunityRule is currently administered and primarily authored by MEDLab director Nathan Schneider.
Evolution
If a community of contributors and users forms around CommunityRule, it should develop into a more community-driven governance model with the help of CommunityRule itself.