In this episode of Governance Futures, hosts Jamilya and Eugene speak with Seth Frey, computational social scientist and researcher of governance, common pool resources, and online communities. Seth brings insights from years of studying how people self-organize — from Minecraft servers to DAOs — and explores what digital communities can learn from Ostrom’s theories of commons management. The conversation covers the roots of governance in human behavior, why DAOs struggle not from a lack of tools but from a lack of community managers, and why decentralization without culture leads to chaos. Seth shares lessons from online systems like Minecraft and Reddit, reflects on the balance between centralization and decentralization, and discusses how “off-chain” culture and human development are the true frontiers of Web3 governance. The episode closes with his one-word vision for governance: Scaling Local.   Some of the materials we mention in the episode: Online communities as model systems for commons governance- https://enfascination.com/weblog/post/2907 Timestamps 00:00 – Cold start 01:00 – Introduction: Hosts reflect on their conversation with Seth 04:25 – Overview of Seth’s work on governance and common pool resources 05:57 – Parallels between traditional and digital commons 08:11 – Applying Ostrom’s framework to digital resources 10:11 – The Ostroms’ contribution: self-organization beyond market and state 12:34 – Eleanor Ostrom’s legacy and early research journey 14:35 – Defining common resources in Web3: attention and computational limits 15:42 – Lag, attention, and other finite digital resources 18:02 – What Minecraft communities teach us about self-governance 20:00 – Bureaucracy and creativity in online worlds 22:26 – Rules as history lessons vs. proactive governance 24:11 – From informal play to formal systems: emergent order in communities 26:20 – How users invented governance in Minecraft 28:34 – Human motivation in governance: enthusiasm vs. apathy 30:43 – When democracy is appropriate — earning participation 33:02 – The problem with solving problems you don’t yet have 34:53 – Benevolent dictatorships and transitions to community management 37:02 – Why communities resist picking up the ball of participation 39:21 – Learning from lived experience, not ideology 41:03 – Off-chain culture, vibes, and the role of community managers 43:11 – Building strong community culture as a governance project 45:12 – The science of vibes and sustaining good culture 47:15 – Redefining decentralization and polycentric governance 49:36 – Power, purity, and the myth of total decentralization 51:30 – Bureaucracy as fairness and human-centered governance 53:29 – Training people to govern: developing human capacity 55:30 – Technology vs. people — garbage in, garbage out 56:20 – Leadership’s paradox: top-down democracy building 58:37 – Standardizing culture without killing diversity 01:00:48 – Polycentric systems: designing top-down and bottom-up balance 01:03:02 – AI in governance: developmental, not managerial 01:05:26 – AI as a tool for training future human governors 01:07:24 – One-word quiz: Inspiration, Futility, Off-chain, Scaling Local 01:14:19 – Closing reflections and outro