Digital civil society and digital governance

                                      Philadelphia, Independence Hall, photo by Miguel Angel Sanz from Unsplash

I'm an historian. I used to sit in graduate seminars about the founding of the United States and wonder what these guys (all men, those founding fathers) were really thinking? Where did their ideas come from? There's lots of important scholarship about this now, including work that centers the knowledge of indigenous communities (land stolen, ideas taken). 

We're in a moment like that one in digital spaces. Pick an area of social, economic or political life and I can guarantee you people somewhere are trying to figure out how to govern energy systems, communication sites, health policy, economic policy, political campaigns, and nations in ways that account for our digital dependencies, something the 18th century thinkers were spared. Governance questions are broad, although 3 of them are easy to ask, hard to answer and have shaped my professional career. Those three questions are:

1. What's public?
2. What's private? 
3. Who decides?
   

Here are two very different approaches to thinking about these issues. The first is a collection of essays on governance called "The Digitalist Papers," a nod to John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton's work on The Federalist Papers. Unlike Madison, Jay, and Hamilton, these authors don't bother hiding their identity, nor have they taken to publishing the papers in serialized fashion in major news outlets. The Digitalist Papers also (gasp!) include essays from women and people of color, though they rely on Ivory Tower scholars and not political decision-makers. The whole thing was cooked up at Stanford. As in all things digital or political, knowing who wrote the code is important.

The second example is a study of governance in the fediverse (you know, Mastodon etc.) by two prolific users of it. Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi undertook the study and wrote it up. They use the fediverse and write about it. They are not ivory tower academics though they're day jobs bring them into very close proximity. It's a study of "what is" and "what could be," where the digitalist papers are a collection of "should be's."

The fediverse in relation to the majority of the web is a good analog for civil society and its relationship to the marketplace in phsyical space. There are important lessons to be found in these analyses for thinking about the reality of civil society and democracy today.

The Fediverse study is here.

The Digitalist Papers are here.