  Managers regularly face a complex ethical dilemma over how to best govern
online communities by evaluating the effectiveness of different social or
technical strategies. What ethical considerations should guide researchers and
managers when they employ causal research methods that make different community
members bear different risks and benefits, under different levels of consent?
We introduce a structural framework for evaluating the flows of risks and
benefits in social systems with multiple interacting parties. This framework
has implications for understanding the governmentality of managing
socio-technical systems, for making research ethics discussions more
commensurable, and for enumerating alternative goals researchers might pursue
with interventions.
