{"id":26,"date":"2008-05-13T11:07:09","date_gmt":"2008-05-13T16:07:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/publius\/2008\/05\/13\/esther-dyson-governance-tacit-or-expl"},"modified":"2008-11-13T10:47:41","modified_gmt":"2008-11-13T15:47:41","slug":"dyson-governance-tacit-or-explicit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/publius\/2008\/05\/13\/dyson-governance-tacit-or-explicit\/","title":{"rendered":"Governance – Tacit or Explicit?"},"content":{"rendered":"

essay by Esther Dyson<\/a>, a response to David Weinberger<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

The whole point of the net is that it is decentralized and heterogeneous: One size need not fit all. Thus there is no need to resolve the question of whether tacit or explicit rules are better for online communities. But you can ask when to use each\u2026and how do they interact? You could ask those same questions about offline communities and get some of the same answers, but there are two important differences online: Online communities can have much greater scale and reach. And they are much easier to join or leave (and rejoin under a new identity), so they have a much higher proportion of strangers. <\/p>\n

So, when should we use tacit rules? As David Weinberger points out, they are wonderful. People share common goals, they police themselves, and everything works. And indeed it does, in small groups of people who know one another and share values. (I define \u201ccommunity\u201d as a group in which a member who leaves is missed.) <\/p>\n

Indeed, says Weinberger, \u201cthe rise of explicit rules is a sign of failure.\u201d <\/p>\n

Perhaps so, but we learn from failure. Those explicit rules are a result of learning\u2026and they make learning easier. Without them, we couldn\u2019t easily share that learning with people who had not lived through the failure of tacit governance.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why over time, offline, we have developed rules for dealing with \u201cforeign\u201d communities, with outsiders and invaders. The development of explicit rules surely helped us to deal with foreigners\u2014 not just as invaders or invadees, but as equal but different communities who could have their own, possibly tacit rules internally, but would observe certain more general, explicit rules in dealing with outsiders. Those explicit rules make it easier to operate effectively with strangers \u2013 so that they do not make mistakes that might cause friction or worse between communities. You can\u2019t expect a stranger to follow tacit rules. <\/p>\n

Let\u2019s look at what happens when we attempt to scale up with tacit rules, even for insiders. In thinking about this, I have the advantage of having spent the weekend at a seminar with a group of Russians. In Russia, there\u2019s a proliferation of laws, but the overall system of governance is mostly tacit in practice. (That\u2019s not to say that there is not a lot of excruciatingly explicit paperwork, but most of it is irrelevant.) This tacit system \u2013 of connections, unspoken rules, shadowy powers – leads to all kinds of maladies. Those in power can act as they like almost with impunity. Those without power but with an understanding of the rules can mostly stay out of trouble.<\/p>\n

But those who don\u2019t understand the rules, or who question them, can lose their freedom or even their lives. (As Russian politician Boris Nemtsov<\/a> once pointed out [in paraphrase], \u201cYes, there is freedom of speech. But that does not necessarily mean freedom after speech.\u201d) <\/p>\n

Tacit rules are inherently hostile to outsiders and to trouble-makers \u2013 and ineffective with them as well. Weinberger\u2019s tacit rules are benign, but most tacit rules are not so benign. And if they were explicit, they could be more easily condemned and repudiated. <\/p>\n

Even if the rules are good, their implicitness makes them harder for newcomers to understand. Yes, newcomers can observe and learn, but the burden that imposes should be acknowledged. And finally, tacit rules are harder to spread, since they can\u2019t be easily transferred to other communities. That\u2019s unfortunate, because ideally communities can learn from one another, either by copying one another\u2019s rules, or by having members who bring effective rules with them.
\n
\nCommunities: Intelligent design or evolution? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Add another factor: Online communities are easy to enter and leave, which means that communities with bad rules \u2013 whether tacit or explicit \u2013 can be abandoned without much harm. There are no burned-out neighborhoods left behind, though there may be bitter memories in the hearts of some members. This allows for competition among rule sets, leading to the survival of good communities and the destruction of \u201cbad\u201d ones, by whatever measure.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s another, possibly better form of evolution, rather than survival of the fittest communities: That\u2019s learning and change within a community. Tacit rules may be effective, but they aren\u2019t that easy to change. <\/p>\n

In fact, we need rules, but we also need an explicit grammar by which they can be changed. Explicit rules, by their very explicitness, can be expressed and can be changed. <\/p>\n

That is, what kind of group consent is required for the change? Can they be changed to benefit only one or two parties? Can they be retroactive? If someone lived by the rules and now they have changed, what is owed to those who were bound by the old rules? (This too is visible in Russian society: What does the state owe to a loyal factory manager who worked hard but never got equity? When the factory was privatized, did the factory manager have no rights at all versus a foreign buyer wading in with wads of cash? Or, more likely, did the tacit ability of a legislator\u2019s cousin to know when the property was to be put up for auction?) <\/p>\n

Scaling laws <\/strong><\/p>\n

Finally, let\u2019s consider scale. In a large community, participants are not likely to know one another. If the stakes are small \u2013 if the site is devoted to discussion or content rather than transactions (including the \u201ctransaction\u201d of disclosing someone\u2019s secrets \u2013 that doesn\u2019t matter much. But if people are putting money or other valuables, including their reputations, at risk, then they need some kind of accountability and reputation system. That again needs to end up fairly explicit. What are the rules of membership and of disbarment? To what extent do those rules depend on external rules \u2013 such as the requirement of entering a credit card number as a light credential? Like it or not, the danger of some individuals compromising the system are just too great. Just ask eBay, which spends a dismaying proportion of its resources fighting fraud. <\/p>\n

Of course, it\u2019s possible for a small, tacit community to come up with ratings or other badges that its users can wear in other, looser communities. And those \u201ccertifying\u201d communities themselves can have reputations that let members of other communities know whether to trust them. With luck, everyone can just get along without consulting the rules, but the knowledge that they are there provides protection for everyone.
\n
\nEsther Dyson is a long-time catalyst of start-ups and new ideas, primarily in information technology, but also in health care and in private aviation and space\u2014all markets disrupted by privatization, decentralization, and the impact of IT.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

essay by Esther Dyson, a response to David Weinberger. The whole point of the net is that it is decentralized and heterogeneous: One size need not fit all. Thus there is no need to resolve the question of whether tacit or explicit rules are better for online communities. But you can ask when to use […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1764,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2688,2628,714,753,2627,2623,2626,3592,1452],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-charlie-leadbetter","category-david-johnson","category-david-weinberger","category-esther-dyson","category-jp-rangaswami","category-kevin-werbach","category-pierre-de-vries","category-tacit-vs-explicit-governance","category-wendy-seltzer"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/publius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/publius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/publius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/publius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1764"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/publius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/publius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/publius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/publius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/publius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}