Criteria for Analyzing the Governance of Attention in Online Communities

Discussion

Ronen Tamari et al.:

On: Heuristics for attention in governance

"To augment existing literature on the governance of commons and online communities, and drawing on the preceding case studies, we propose the following heuristics for the analysis and design of attention economies as mediated by governance surfaces. The heuristics consist of five questions that researchers and designers might ask about the flows of attention around governance surfaces. We expect that designers will have to make context-sensitive tradeoffs among the considerations that these heuristics raise; researchers will inevitably choose to focus on some and not others.

Modes: What kinds of activities require attention for the governance of the organisation?

Modes of attention refer to the various kinds of participation the system requires for its governance. In each of the case studies, organisations require participants to invest attention in reviewing proposals that could be approved by a member vote; DAOstack, for instance, encourages a division of labour between attention for sorting through many proposals and attention for voting on them. Any kind of attention can also vary by degree—that is, quantity or intensity. The degree of attention can be characterised in economic terms as the attention cost. The degree of attention a particular type of participation requires further depends on a participant’s experience or training; proposal review might require less attention from an experienced participant than from a novice. In general, different actors will have differing preferences and competencies with respect to different modes of participation.

Processes: What organisational and technical processes manage attention around the governance of the system?

A combination of processes mediate attention across governance surfaces. These processes arise through organisational structure, such as hierarchies of authority and social norms, as well as technical systems, such as communications interfaces and decision-making methods. While the role of attention is often implicit, in each of the case studies, participants seek to explicitly redirect attention through software automation. The cases also show how organisational and technical processes mutually shape and constrain each other; for example, voting delegation, as in GitcoinDAO, is influenced by distributions of social capital among members. This process does not, however, attempt to make that distribution representative demographically, geographically, or in terms of various skill-sets.

Processes that distribute attention raise questions of fairness and justice.

Information: What information is available to participants, and how does it affect the expectations placed on their attention?

Informed participation in governance requires knowledge that lies beyond any one participant’s purview. Depending on the organisation, information relevant for governance may come in large or small quantities, and it may be available in ways that are highly accessible or that require considerable labour for interpretation. A highly transparent organisation might provide extensive information, which however incurs high attention costs for participants to examine and interpret; as Beller put it, ‘to look is to labour’ (Beller, 1994). An AI-aided governance system, conversely, may require lower attention costs to access information, but the assumptions underlying the AI may be inaccessible to users.

The legibility of information is thus an important variable in the attention economics of a governance surface. Choices about disclosure are also value-laden.

The GitcoinDAO scorecard system makes certain information accessible in order to ease decision-making but introduces assumptions regarding what to measure and how to measure it.

Incentives: What are the costs and benefits for various participants to invest attention in governance?

Organisations often seek to incentivise participants to incur attention costs willingly. The incentives for governance participation can take diverse forms—not only personal benefits but also collective benefits to the organisation or a broader community.

For example, hosting a community gathering to discuss a contentious issue may result in high personal cost and low personal benefit while being highly valuable to the community. DAOstack, in contrast, aimed to incentivise attention through individual financial benefit. Characterising attention costs and benefits naturally invites a consideration of the ratio between them—a return on attention. When participants perceive a high return on attention, communities will presumably attract active involvement in governance. Attention from others can itself be an incentive for participation (Srinivasan, 2023). Conversely, communities will have trouble attracting participation if the return on attention is perceived to be low. It is important to be wary of high expectations of attention from groups who do not experience commensurate benefit from their contributions, as feminist scholarship has long taught (Nagbot, 2016).

Feedback: How does attention to past outcomes influence future attention allocation and an organisation’s subsequent evolution?

Human institutions are dynamical systems, meaning that their past outcomes become feedback that affect their future behavior. Thus, the analysis of attention economies requires a recognition of how they operate within an evolving institutional context. Participants allocate attention to governance with intent (or at least preferences) to guide the evolution of the organisation. Systems scientist Jay Forrester demonstrated that feedback mechanisms create unintuitive behaviors within social systems, but they are also tools that can assess and steer those systems toward intended outcomes (Forrester, 1971). A governance surface can allocate attention to generate feedback for improving its own operations. This is what leaders in GitcoinDAO discovered, and they adapted their governance surface in several ways accordingly."

Source: Online Governance Surfaces and Attention Economies. Nathan Schneider, Kelsie Nabben Ronen Tamari, and Michael Zargham. Metagov, 2025