The best citizens of a large-scale democracy are those who have built and broken several small ones to see how they work. By empowering people to build any kind of community together, the Internet has become a laboratory for self-governance experimentation. Groups who start online communities must overcome the challenges of recruiting finite resources around difficult common goals. Fortunately, they can draw on a growing range of support technologies, peer networks, and scholarship. With their transparency, the Internet's millions of online communities can be surveyed for insights into their design and functioning. Looking at three large platforms for small self-governing online communities, we will pose several questions of institutional processes at the population level, as drawn from the literatures on common-pool resource management and institutional analysis and design.