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This is: Norms of Membership for Voluntary Groups, published by sarahconstantin on the LessWrong.
Epistemic Status: Idea Generation
One feature of the internet that we haven’t fully adapted to yet is that it’s trivial to create voluntary groups for discussion. It’s as easy as making a mailing list, group chat, Facebook group, Discord server, Slack channel, etc.
What we don’t seem to have is a good practical language for talking about norms on these mini-groups — what kind of moderation do we use, how do we admit and expel members, what kinds of governance structures do we create.
Maybe this is a minor thing to talk about, but I suspect it has broader impact. In past decades voluntary membership in organizations has declined in the US — we’re less likely to be members of the Elks or of churches or bowling leagues — so lots of people who don’t have any experience in founding or participating in traditional types of voluntary organizations are now finding themselves engaged in governance without even knowing that’s what they’re doing.
When we do this badly, we get “internet drama.” When we do it really badly, we get harassment campaigns and calls for regulation/moderation at the corporate or even governmental level. And that makes the news. It’s not inconceivable that Twitter moderation norms affect international relations, for instance.
It’s a traditional observation about 19th century America that Americans were eager joiners of voluntary groups, and that these groups were practice for democratic participation. Political wonks today lament the lack of civic participation and loss of trust in our national and democratic institutions. Now, maybe you’ve moved on; maybe you’re a creature of the 21st century and you’re not hoping to restore trust in the institutions of the 20th. But what will be the institutions of the future? That may well be affected by what formats and frames for group membership people are used to at the small scale.
It’s also relevant for the future of freedom. It’s starting to be a common claim that “give people absolute ‘free speech’ and the results are awful; therefore we need regulation/governance at the corporate or national level.” If you’re not satisfied with that solution (as I’m not), you have work to do — there are a lot of questions to unpack like “what kind of ‘freedom’, with what implementational details, is the valuable kind?”, “if small-scale voluntary organizations can handle some of the functions of the state, how exactly will they work?”, “how does one prevent the outcomes that people consider so awful that they want large institutions to step in to govern smaller groups?”
Thinking about, and working on, governance for voluntary organizations (and micro-organizations like online discussion groups) is a laboratory for figuring this stuff out in real time, with fairly low resource investment and risk. That’s why I find this stuff fascinating and wish more people did.
The other place to start, of course, is history, which I’m not very knowledgeable about, but intend to learn a bit. David Friedman is the historian I’m familiar with who’s studied historical governance and legal systems with an eye to potential applicability to building voluntary governance systems today; I’m interested in hearing about others. (Commenters?)
In the meantime, I want to start generating a (non-exhaustive list) of types of norms for group membership, to illustrate the diversity of how groups work and what forms “expectations for members” can take.
We found organizations based on formats and norms that we’ve seen before. It’s useful to have an idea of the range of formats that we might encounter, so we don’t get anchored on the first format that comes to mind. It’s also good to have a vocabulary so we can have higher-quality disagreements about the purpose & nature of ...
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