13A/ POLY: The Game of Community Go Verifiable - come brainstorm a game for communities to create their own rules

From IIW

Poly: The Game of Community Governance


Session Convener: Joyce and Doc Searls

Notes-taker(s): Peter Langenkamp

Tags / links to resources / technology discussed, related to this session:


Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:


Challenge: Rules for a game for making rules


Brainstorm (NOTE: more was discussed, my personal notes were incomplete)

If we were a community and we were going to set some rules, and were going to do this in a tabletop game format…

“We’re doing this locally because we think it’s best to make this happen in a physical place” (not dependent on ‘apple space’, ‘google space’, …

You want folks to have fun, and to be able to replay the game, but also to learn something

If people get together just to play the game, they start to become a community already

Trying to start in our little group with ‘These are the principles that we think are good ideas’

Creating (new) governance rules is a part of the game eventually

Set up a similar game with professor in Cambridge, show that it actually works in practice

Several years ago, a grant to build a game. Organizing into hierarchy or as flat organization structure. Like clue. Used the game, afterwards they asked ‘how do you feel’?

Figuring out what works best (hierarchical vs. flat which allows for self-organizing teams)

  • Resulted in papers and talks at conferences

Social media apps could use moderation system that’s the result of what a community came up themselves

Communities don’t fail on the best path. So most of the community members should be cooperative, but some should be adversarial if you want to create something durable (resistant against non-cooperative subset) using this process

When doing the experiment, many participants tended to ask whether it was a cooperative or competitive exercise. Not allowed to answer this.

The US military so advanced (ahead of adversaries) that they can afford to publish publicly, in fact need to in order to get allies up to the same level.

  • Good example in (self-organizing) Ukrainians trained by US going up against the strongly hierarchical Russian military

We need to do stuff for it to stick, simply reading about it isn’t enough

Focus here on table-top style game because of the desire to create a local community

So what should be in the game?

  • Do we want cards?
  • …

Maybe even not give participants a hypothetical problem, but simply the real problem

Does the university have a game design dept? They do, but still need to get in touch

The game is called Poly, because Polycentric is the way governance happens

Having some objective measure (like tokens) that participants can think about, as opposed to just going by how they feel, … You could design a relatively simple game that starts with things people like, and things people want. Craigslist style selling

Everyone can make a game, but not necessarily a fun game

Chirstopher Allen runs a game company, has written a book about it

What is the game that will achieve the greater good for this community that we are about to start?

You don’t want apathy to take hold and people not to care anymore

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