Make it Explicit: Designing Governance with CommunityRule

As we add new flows of data, communication, and economy to our social lives, we need appropriate governance. Nathan Schneider introduced tools to navigate complex digital projects by making different governance approaches explicit, and therefore build decision architectures that are made to evolve - rather than to fix the status quo. CommunityRule is an experimental web app that provides an interface for drafting and editing simple rules. It comes with templates, now available as a booklet, with some basic rule-sets to start with.


In this hands-on workshop, we used the CommunityRule templates for exploring a fictional case presented by Niklas Kossow from CityLAB Berlin. By imagining a regional data hub we made some implicit rule-sets explicit, and designed new rules for the future. Understanding governance as an interlinked process helped us to be more specific about who has a say in e.g. designing, financing, building or owning the data hub.


Check out the template which was specifically designed for the workshop here: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lw6VYgY=/?invite_link_id=113949524860