Governance Redesign

Take a real community, rewrite how it governs itself, and defend the rewrite against the evidence of what your own rules did for four weeks

Due: 24 May 2027 · Weight: 30%

The brief#

Choose a community with a governance problem. Fix it on paper, and cost the fix in volunteer hours.

By week 12 you have written a ruleset, encoded part of it in a machine, enforced it against your classmates, heard appeals, designed a rota and audited four weeks of your own automated decisions. This is the assessment that asks what you now think.

Pick a real community — not the sandbox — with a governance problem you can evidence. Diagnose it from the public record. Then redesign: the rules, what is automated and what is not, the enforcement ladder, the appeal route, the rota that staffs it, and the succession plan for when the people who agreed to it leave.

Three tests your redesign must pass, and they are the same three ShiftBot failed in week 11. Can a newcomer discover the rule before breaking it. Can a decision under it be explained to the person it happened to. Can it be staffed by the volunteers who actually exist, at the hours they are actually awake.

The third criterion is what separates this from an essay. You have run a governance system. Some of it did not work. Cite your own audit against your own proposal, and if your redesign would have made a week 8 decision worse, say so.

What you submit#

3,000 words, including the ruleset as it would be published, the rationale register, and the costing in hours per week. Position on machine contribution required — you have the evidence for one now.