Many instances of socio-technical systems in the digital society and digital economy require some form of self-governance. Examples include community energy systems, peer production systems, participatory sensing applications, and shared management of communal living areas or workspace. Such systems have several features in common, of which three are that they are rule-oriented , self-organising, and value-sensitive , and in operation, this combination of features entails self-modification of the rules in order to satisfice a changeable set of values. This presents a fundamental dilemma for systems design. On the one hand, the system must be sufficiently unrestricted (resilient, flexible) to enable a diverse group but with a shared set of congruent values to achieve their joint purposes in collective action situations. On the other hand, it must be sufficiently restricted (stable, robust) to prevent a subset of the group from exploiting self-determination ‘against itself’ and usurp control of the system for the benefit of its own narrow interests. To address this problem, we consider a study of classical Athenian democracy which investigates how the governance model of the city-state flourished. The work suggests that exceptional knowledge management , i.e., making information available for socially productive purposes, played a crucial role in sustaining its democracy for nearly 200 years, by creating processes for aggregation, alignment, and codification of knowledge. We therefore examine the proposition that some properties can be generalised to resolve the rule-restriction dilemma by establishing a set of design principles intended to make knowledge management processes open, inclusive, transparent, and effective in self-governed social technical systems. We operationalise three of these principles in the context of a collective action situation, namely self-organised common-pool resource allocation, and present the results of a series of experiments showing how knowledge management processes can be used to obtain robust solutions for the perception of fairness, allocation decision, and punishment mechanisms. By applying this operationalisation of the design principles for knowledge management processes as a complement to institutional approaches to governance, we demonstrate empirically how it can satisfice shared values, distribute power fairly, and apply “common sense” in dealing with rule violations. We conclude by arguing that this approach to the design of socio-technical systems can provide a balance between restricted and unrestricted self-modification of conventional rules, and can thus provide the foundations for sustainable and democratic self-governance in socio-technical systems.

中文翻译：

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自组织资源分配的知识管理

数字社会和数字经济中的许多社会技术系统实例都需要某种形式的自治。示例包括社区能源系统、对等生产系统、参与式传感应用程序以及公共生活区或工作空间的共享管理。这样的系统有几个共同的特点，其中三个是它们是规则导向,自组织，和价值敏感，并且在操作中，这种特征组合需要对规则进行自我修改，以满足一组可变的值。这为系统设计提出了一个基本难题。一方面，该系统必须足够不受限制（弹性、灵活），以使多样化的群体能够在集体行动的情况下实现他们共同的目标。另一方面，它必须受到足够的限制（稳定、稳健），以防止该群体的一个子集利用“反对自己”的自决权和为了自身狭隘利益的利益而篡夺对系统的控制权。为了解决这个问题，我们考虑了对古典雅典民主的研究，该研究调查了城邦的治理模式是如何蓬勃发展的。这项工作表明，特殊的知识管理，即为社会生产目的提供信息，通过创建知识的聚合、对齐和编码过程，在维持其民主近 200 年中发挥了关键作用。因此，我们检验了这样一个命题，即通过建立一组设计原则旨在使知识管理过程在自治的社会技术系统中开放、包容、透明和有效。我们在集体行动情境的背景下实施了其中三个原则，即自组织的公共池资源分配，并展示了一系列实验的结果，展示了如何使用知识管理过程来获得强大的解决方案公平、分配决定和惩罚机制。通过将知识管理流程的设计原则的这种操作化作为对治理的制度方法的补充，我们凭经验证明了它如何满足共同的价值观，公平地分配权力，并在处理违反规则的情况下应用“常识”。