(2021-01-09) Schneider Online Communities Are Still Catching Up To My Mothers Garden Club

Nathan Schneider: Online Communities Are Still Catching Up to My Mother's Garden Club. Alongside whatever else mothers and sons talk about, I have begun receiving regular updates on the governance of my mother’s neighborhood garden club. They make me jealous.

The Internet has so far forgotten the bias for democracy that long reigned among offline clubs, public companies, and other associations. How can the Internet catch up to my mother’s garden club—or, even better, enable a new renaissance in creative self-governance?

The Internet can enable much more than just a return to regimes of bylaws and boards. I long for a time when communities can pick and choose from among governance plugins as easily as using an app store, or create plugins of their own.

Rather than relying on formal bylaws full of shalls and subsections, we could develop visual interfaces for describing our communities more accessibly and intuitively.

The point isn’t to replace implicit feudalism with some other rigid default. I think what we really need is institutional diversity—lots of options available for different sorts of use cases.

Ordinary users have no means of holding admins themselves accountable, short of asking for interventions from whatever corporation owns the platform.

Where traces of online democracy do exist, like in Wikipedia or the Debian operating system, it has emerged through extensive planning and custom software. The default is feudal.

There are historical reasons for this. Many of the earliest online communities were on BBSes, or bulletin-board services. These were often hosted on computers in the homes of their admins

The language is formal, with lots of “shall” statements and capitalized terms. The club members don’t normally talk this way with each other. But when they have decisions to make or conflicts among them, they can flip to those pages and find a path forward.

Most neighborhood garden clubs have something similar. Most online communities do not.

The Internet has been plagued by a phenomenon I call “implicit feudalism”...“benevolent dictators for life.”

I have experienced implicit feudalism as a hand tied behind my back. In my stints as a community administrator, I have tried to use my power to encourage democracy, and it’s very hard. Neither the features of our tools nor the norms we expect do much to equip us for this.

No online group I’ve been part of can hold a candle to the simple and effective rule-set that has governed the garden club since the 1960s. Few online groups will last so long.

The club’s bylaws occupy eight pages.

Here's an example.