In particular, users highlighted the challenges of shifting typically extrinsic motivators for civic behavior to intrinsic motivation, given the cost-incentive structure of the internet. As one participant put aptly, “The offline world is full of sticks, but the internet only has carrots.”
D20 Governance is a project focused on exploring modular governance through unstable communication environments and simulations. It aims to estrange the quotidian act of communication as a way of revealing ways in which interactions in online communities are infrastructurally prefigured by forms and norms of linguistic interoperability and implicit feudalism. D20 Governance aims to surface this revelation as a way of foregrounding the metagoverning architectures that order online phone number library communications, and catalyze experiences that empower communities to imagine and form more creative, flexible, experimental, and intentional patterns of self-governance. The current iteration of D20 Governance takes form as a Discord bot, and extends the composable governance mapping tool, CommunityRule. The D20 Governance working group is led by Janita Chalam, Val Elefante, Hazel, and Cent Hosten, and is supervised by Metagov research director Ellie Rennie.
For DWeb Camp we ran our first playtest with a group of eight campers placed into a “Build A Community” simulation where they had to name their community, decide on an animating purpose, and decide on their first action. The playtest had participants eloquently reciting Shakespearean recitations of their LLM-transformed posts and revolting against consensus as a decision-making mechanism. Stay tuned for future play test announcements in the newsletter.