New section on the governance of virtual communities, peer production communities but especially blockchain-type collaborations.

Quotes

"Prevalent among communities forming around blockchain technology more specifically is an emphasis on relegating governance to automated enforcement by a protocol, coordinating the otherwise free actions of actors in the network. More than a technology, blockchain has come to represent a powerful narrative and governance ideology (Reijers and Coeckelbergh, 2016), promising the possibility of automating governance, understood as the coordination of individual actions at aggregate scales. This idea has manifested in different approaches to governance in blockchain communities, which we discuss in part one of this article as materialist, designer, and emergent ideas, and approaches to governance relating these to three evolutions of governance theory (Mayntz 2003). Blockchain is a particularly fruitful context for discussing dissensus as it is navigated by online communities because, as an ideology, it so explicitly seeks to achieve consensus through technological arrangements."

- Kate Beecroft et al. [1]

Status

WE ARE NOT THERE YET, shows Rebbeca Grace Rachmany:

"The promise of DAOs has been to create more advanced decision-making systems. Yet, to date, the DAO technology has provided little more than voting and funds allocation mechanisms. To govern at a global level has become an imperative in the pandemic, which affects all human beings on earth. Managing this crisis and those to come requires the development of technologies that cover all aspects of discussion, collaboration, proposal-making and accountability."

(https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/09/21/daos-will-never-govern-the-world-at-this-pace/)

Typology

of governnance mechanisms:

• Consensus Algorithm
• Voting in Blockchain Communities
• Staking in Blockchain Communities
• Forking in Blockchain Communities
• Dissensus Protocols

Key Resources

Key Articles

• Limitations of Cryptoeconomic Governance Mechanisms. By Nathan Schneider.