Zhang, Amy X., Grant Hugh, and Michael S. Bernstein. "PolicyKit: building governance in online communities." Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. 2020.

PolicyKit is a novel software infrastructure designed to diversify and simplify the governance models of online community platforms, which traditionally rely heavily on moderators and administrators. By integrating political science theories, PolicyKit allows community members to easily create and implement a wide array of governance procedures through policies—short imperative functions that decide the permissibility of user actions, including posting messages, moderating content, and even altering governance policies themselves. This flexibility enables communities to adopt more democratic or distributed forms of governance, reducing the need for manual oversight. The paper showcases PolicyKit's versatility by implementing various governance models, such as random jury deliberation, multi-stage caucus, reputation systems, and a process akin to Wikipedia's Request for Adminship, demonstrating its potential to facilitate the evolution of online community governance.