As social computing systems grow, it becomes increasingly important to institute some sort of site management or governance. Site governance work is important to help keep the site working smoothly as many new people with many new motives and agendas use the site. Wikipedia is famous for making public its large quantity of governance work: deleting inappropriate articles, reverting unwanted changes, setting site-wide policies, rewarding users for contribution, etc. All large sites need governance of some kind, though not all sites make it as public as Wikipedia. Facebook, for example, has a team of employees that work on eliminating unwanted people / pages, developing the site, soliciting partners, etc.
Once a site grows large enough, it needs a non-trivial amount of governance work. One way to get this done is to form a company and pay employees to do the governance. Many sites try to automate some of the governance work, such as cleaning up unwanted spam. Finally, many sites look to their users and try to encourage their users to voluntarily do some of the governance work.
And, to me, this opens up an interesting opportunity. How can we design social media systems that encourage at least some users to perform the necessary governance work?
Slashdot has an interesting model in this area. They use part-corporate (the editors are all professional, paid employees) and part-user governance. Users of Slashdot moderate and filter content in the discussions, and then meta-moderate others to ensure a consistent, valuable moderation system. Slashdot has a complicated procedure for assigning rights to moderate based on a number of criteria, including how valuable your contributions have been in the past, and how much meta-moderation you have engaged in. In this way, the ability to moderate, or exercise control, is used as a reward for other types of less interesting governance. Governance that encourages governance!
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