About

CommunityRule is a governance toolkit for great communities

“For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalized.” (Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”)

Too many of our communities adopt default governance practices that rely on the unchecked authority of founders, admins, or moderators, lacking even basic features of small-scale democracy. The purpose of CommunityRule is to help communities establish appropriate norms for decision-making, stewardship, and culture.

More background information is at the FAQ, and use the Guides to get started making a Rule of your own.

The governance practices we share here have long roots in diverse cultures. To ensure this inheritance remains a commons, content on CommunityRule is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, which means that anyone has the right to use and adapt it, and adaptations must be re-shared under the same license.

CommunityRule is a project of the Media Enterprise Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, in collaboration with the Metagovernance Project.

CommunityRule is primarily authored by MEDLab director Nathan Schneider and Drew Hornbein, who also administer the project. If a community of contributors and users forms around CommunityRule, it should develop into a more community-driven governance model with the help of CommunityRule itself.

To contribute to the project, post Issues and Merge Requests to the project on GitLab, or send an email to medlab@colorado.edu.