Governance Framework

Full Title or Meme

An abstraction of a set of compliance conditions for an organization to function.

Context

• In the context of Identity Management, a Governance Framework deals primarily with Community and Privacy in the digital world.
• Governance is a concept with many meanings. See the wiki page on Digital Governance for more general information.
• Often viewed as a way to reduce conflict within society, the traditional perception of governance is one that maintains stability with minimal disturbance. Alson posits that conflict not all conflict should be removed, but that a Governance Framework should describe how to deal with conflict and codify the decisions as precedent.

Problems

• The essential problem with the Internet is the assumption that people left to their own private impulses will do good. The reality of a lack of governance is clear in those spaces where there is no control over people's actions. Those spaces always are reduced to the primal behavior of greed and nastiness of one for the other. People even create automated robot entities (bots) to roam the web causing disruption and thievery.
• There are many sovereign governments that are trying to force their own version of Governance Frameworks on the Internet. It should be no surprise that difference governments have different ideas about what is to be permitted by themselves as well as the other entities within their jurisdictions.
• From the article in Wired Howe to Govern the Metaverse and in the book Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson we are taught that "to build healthy communities in virtual reality, we must move beyond automated penalties toward proactive forms of governance. Games can show us how. Right now, one of the most common forms of governance in virtual worlds is a reactive and punitive form of moderation." Which is a primal reaction in its own right and has been shown over the centuries to be inadequate. "The internet is still operating like the American west in in 19th century. In fluid, globalized online communities, it’s difficult to know how to adequately identify suspects and determine jurisdiction. Now, with Facebook predicting the coming metaverse and the proposal to move our work and social interactions into VR, the importance of dealing with harmful behaviors in these spaces is drawn even more sharply into focus. Researchers and designers of virtual worlds are increasingly setting their sights on more proactive methods of virtual governance that not only deal with acts like virtual groping once they occur but discourage such acts in the first place while encouraging more positive behaviors too." [edited for brevity]
• There are three patterns in creating digital Governance Frameworks:

1. Apply existing legal and social practices to the new technology. One significant example of this is the UE GDPR General Data Protection Regulation, which took the existing laws and legal precedents of the EU and tried to use traditional legislative and regulatory functions to create it. The result is not particularly productive.
2. Create new methods like the Internet's IANA and now ICANN committees to establish the "rule of the road". That has worked for the DNS and some other naming conventions.
3. Create entirely new modes of operation like Blockchain using Distributed Ledger Technology and then get a bunch of digital and legal technologists together to create an entirely new pattern. One example of this is the Trust over IP (ToIP) foundation that is operating under the Linux Foundation. This is also called rebooting the web of trust that was described in early PGP documentation.

• The assumption that all governance is good, or even well-meaning is not a way to create Resilience in an Ecosystem - others that might be discovered: bad governance, idiocracy, corrupt government, governance by the unfit, incompetent rule, kakistocracy.

Solutions

The internet of today can be modeled by Halloween where the darkness hides all the evil spirts that abound in human thoughts. What we need to do now is move beyond the darkness of Halloween and move into the light of All Saints Day. To do this we must overcome the darkness that is continually pushing the Internet into Anarchy. We must look for a Governance Framework that can lead us into a new time light spreading across human endeavor in this virtual world.

Data Governance

• Data Governance from the Trust Over IP Foundation described the Human Mars Challenges that could be address by governance. It mostly assumes that the principles of the SSI community will be realized. There is no evidence as of 2023-06 that this was even possible.
• The Data Governance Roadmap from the Standards Council of Canada (SCC).

  Standardization solutions will result in a higher quality of data and trust in access mechanisms, and ensure that tools being deployed are ethical, fair and lawful. It addresses 1. Quality, 2. Trust and 3. Ethics.

• Data governance is a term wide in scope with origins in information management, centering on best practices for data collection, storage, archiving and purging. Common elements of data governance include Collection, Privacy, Usage, Synthesis/Analysis, Control, Publication, Storage and Archiving/ Disposal. (from the SCC reference above.)

Governance as Conflict as Conflict

Governance as Conflict https://law.mit.edu/pub/governanceasconflict/release/1Italic text

References

Other Material

• See the wiki page on Digital Governance for a broader view of Governance.
• See the wiki page on Machine Readable Governance for the structure of an interchange document.