  Governance in online communities is an increasingly high-stakes challenge,
and yet many basic features of offline governance legacies--juries, political
parties, term limits, and formal debates, to name a few--are not in the
feature-sets of the software most community platforms use. Drawing on the
paradigm of Institutional Analysis and Development, this paper proposes a
strategy for addressing this lapse by specifying basic features of a
generalizable paradigm for online governance called Modular Politics. Whereas
classical governance typologies tend to present a choice among wholesale
ideologies, such as democracy or oligarchy, Modular Politics would enable
platform operators and their users to build bottom-up governance processes from
computational components that are modular and composable, highly versatile in
their expressiveness, portable from one context to another, and interoperable
across platforms. This kind of approach could implement pre-digital governance
systems as well as accelerate innovation in uniquely digital techniques. As
diverse communities share and connect their components and data, governance
could occur through a ubiquitous network layer. To that end, this paper
proposes the development of an open standard for networked governance.
