--- layout: page title: About permalink: /about/ --- ## Purpose Too many of our communities, especially online, adopt default governance practices based on top-down "[implicit feudalism](https://osf.io/gxu3a/?view_only=11c9e93011df4865951f2056a64f5938)"—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](https://www.contributor-covenant.org/) 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](https://cmci.colorado.edu/medlab/) at the University of Colorado Boulder, in collaboration with the [Metagovernance Project](http://metagov.org/). ## 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](https://gitlab.com/medlabboulder/communityrule), 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.