CommunityRule
= " a governance-building tool designed to help grassroots, horizontal organizations". [1]
URL = https://communityrule.info/
Description
"CommunityRule is a governance-building tool designed to help grassroots, horizontal organizations define how they make decisions, handle conflict, and operate together before those systems are tested by crisis. A project of the Media Economies Design Lab, led by the community fellows Daniel Shipley and Andy DiLallo, CommunityRule emerges from long experience in mutual aid, cooperatives, and activist groups—spaces where participants have repeatedly seen informal norms collapse into burnout, meeting fatigue, and escalating conflicts.
The core idea behind CommunityRule is to make it easy for groups to adopt a basic, values-aligned governance structure. Based on six months of interviews with cooperators, mutual aid groups, and subject-matter experts, the latest version of the platform guides groups through making implicit governance patterns explicit. Users answer questions about their organization’s size, maturity, and goals, which power a simple recommendation engine. In response, the tool generates tailored guidance on decision-making, conflict management, membership, communication norms, and values.
Implementation centers on flexibility rather than prescription. Groups can start from templates and presets, customize language to fit their context, and ultimately produce a shareable operating manual—exportable as a PDF, Markdown file, or link. The system is also being designed with partial machine-readability in mind, anticipating future governance needs in open-source communities facing floods of AI-generated contributions.
The key lesson CommunityRule offers for building conflict systems is preventative clarity. Formalizing governance early is not bureaucracy but care: it reduces escalation, preserves trust, and gives groups shared reference points when disagreements arise. By helping communities decide how they will decide—before pressure hits—the project supports resilience without sacrificing autonomy."