The software behind online community platforms encodes a
governance model that represents a strikingly narrow set of
governance possibilities focused on moderators and administrators. When online communities desire other forms of
government, such as ones that take many members' opinions
into account or that distribute power in non-trivial ways, communities must resort to laborious manual effort. In this paper,
we present PolicyKit, a software infrastructure that empowers
online community members to concisely author a wide range
of governance procedures and automatically carry out those
procedures on their home platforms. We draw on political
science theory to encode community governance into policies,
or short imperative functions that specify a procedure for determining whether a user-initiated action can execute. Actions
that can be governed by policies encompass everyday activities
such as posting or moderating a message, but actions can also
encompass changes to the policies themselves, enabling the
evolution of governance over time. We demonstrate the expressivity of PolicyKit through implementations of governance
models such as a random jury deliberation, a multi-stage caucus, a reputation system, and a promotion procedure inspired
by Wikipedia's Request for Adminship (RfA) process.
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