  Building a successful community means governing active populations and
limited resources. This challenge often requires communities to design formal
governance systems from scratch. But the characteristics of successful
institutional designs are unclear. Communities that are more mature and
established may have more elaborate formal policy systems. Alternatively, they
may require less formalization precisely because of their maturity. Indeed,
scholars often downplay the role that formal rules relative to unwritten rules,
norms, and values. But in a community with formal rules, decisions are more
consistent, transparent, and legitimate. To understand the relationship of
formal institutions to community maturity and governance style, we conduct a
large-scale quantitative analysis applying institutional analysis frameworks of
self-governance scholar Elinor Ostrom to 80,000 communities across 3 platforms:
the sandbox game Minecraft, the MMO game World of Warcraft, and Reddit. We
classify communities' written rules to test predictors of institutional
formalization. From this analysis we extract two major findings. First,
institutional formalization, the size and complexity of an online community's
governance system, is generally positively associated with maturity, as
measured by age, population size, or degree of user engagement. Second, we find
that online communities employ similar governance styles across platforms,
strongly favoring "weak" norms to "strong" requirements. These findings suggest
that designers and founders of online communities converge on styles of
governance practice that are correlated with successful self-governance. With
deeper insights into the patterns of successful self-governance, we can help
more communities overcome the challenges of self-governance and create for
their members powerful experiences of shared meaning and collective
empowerment.
