PolicyKit: Building Governance in Online Communities
summary
PolicyKit is a working infrastructure that replaces static roles with executable procedures: policies are Python scripts that run continuously, intercept actions from Slack, Reddit, and Discord integrations, and either revert or execute platform actions. The team implements random jury and multi‑stage caucus examples and reproduces a Wikipedia‑style Request for Adminship flow, offers a web editor, starter templates, role/permission and document extensions, and ships open source code at policykit.org.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Start
- 0:27When it comes to the governance model that these tools provide to communities, they all share a strikingly similar pattern
- 0:47These tools describe governance using a permission model. So when a user wants to do something, the tool just checks what permissions they have before they can do it.
- 1:37This permissions model is also prevalent in most collaborative software that you use everyday, even down to the access control for files in UNIX-like operating systems.
- 1:49A permissions model of governance can only describe a limited range of governance models mostly top-down, autocratic, and punitive ones
- 4:56Users can also write policies to govern actions such a adding or updating a policy, allowing users to participate in modifying governance.
- 8:11Here we check whether an action can pass. If 2 jury members have voted yes - then it passes. If zasys have gone by without it passing, then it fails
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