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This paper introduces Social.Wiki, a novel framework for collaboratively creating and managing web content without traditional ownership structures, akin to Wikipedia. By leveraging off-the-shelf AI tools, users with minimal technical skills can contribute to and customize interactive social sites tailored to their communities' needs. The implementation of plural governance and a decentralized infrastructure allows for diverse participation and enhanced data security, showcasing its potential through various case studies and real-world deployments.
Social.Wiki redefines web ownership by enabling communities to collaboratively create and govern their online spaces without centralized control.
Many of the websites people depend on have owners whose interests are not fully aligned with their users. We address the root of this problem by presenting a reimagining of the web where sites are not owned at all but are instead collaboratively produced like Wikipedia articles. We call the system Social.Wiki because it supports the co-creation of interactive social sites, such as those for microblogging, messaging, dating, gaming, ride sharing, and so on. With off-the-shelf AI tools, people with little or no programming experience can edit these sites to better reflect the needs and preferences of their communities. Social.Wiki builds on ideas from collaborative malleable software systems such as Webstrates, but is designed for public participation rather than use only within small, trusted groups. To this end, Social.Wiki includes governance to mitigate conflict. To accommodate diverse governance preferences, our model of"plural governance"lets people independently choose the policies that determine which edits to a site they see. Social.Wiki also implements a granular security model to protect personal data in a malleable environment. Complementing the decentralized design and governance of Social.Wiki sites, both site edits and within-site data are stored on Graffiti, a decentralized infrastructure, decoupling the ownership of underlying servers from the ownership of sites. We evaluate Social.Wiki through case studies that demonstrate the range of sociotechnical structures it supports, as well as through deployments at a hackathon and in the wild.
