Digital Governance

Full Title or Meme

An environment or process by which governments and other organizations can create and enforce Governance Frameworks.

Context

• Governance is a concept with many meanings. In this wiki it shall be limited to the collaborative process of creating Governance Frameworks for use in transactions among digital Entities and the resulting User Experience. The expected participants in Governance creation will be sovereign states, professional organizations, consortia, universities and similar.
• Governance online is much like governance in the real-world, a constant balancing act between order and freedom. Each person, each society is constantly seeking the optimal balance between these two concepts.

Problems

• The core problem is that the proper operation of a distribute common good, line the Internet, is dependent on the goodwill of the human beings that both use and maintain the common resources that we all depend upon. Since we cannot depend on every member operating with goodwill, some rules are required to avoid The Tragedy of the Commons.
• There are a lot of books and articles that seem to espouse one or the other of Order and Freedom, but none that try to take an even-handed review of both. Below are the various ways that these are approached.
• For a different view of Digital Governance as a cloak hiding the reality of what developers build see the views of Nagy & Neff

  "We argue that the conjuration of algorithms allows the tech industry to forge vivid, overly positive, and deterministic narratives that make it challenging for their critics to call attention to the very real harms that algorithmic systems pose to users. We call for discourses of reality instead of magic, as a way to support responsible technology design, development, use, and governance."

Order

• Security and Privacy of the people using the web are continuously bemoaned by users and experts alike. Most solutions take the form of more laws and regulations that stifle the freedom of entities trying to take advantage of the resources of the Internet as a whole and of the web as the most accessible part of the Internet.

Freedom

• Information wants to be free.
• A generative Internet will harness the contributions of all users to make the internet both great and useful.

References

Other Materials

• See wiki page on Machine Readable Governance.
• See wiki page on Governance Framework.