Platform Affordances & Community Norms

Project ARCH seeks to identify and promote sets of platform affordances and community norms that support epistemically productive discourse.

Our ability to collectively make sense of the world depends on our connections and our norms. Connections refer to the people with whom we discuss, debate, and think. Our norms are the rules, formal and informal, by which we process, filter, and information with our connections. Over the last 25 years, digital technologies have rewired our connections at a rate never before seen in human history. Our rules have not had a chance to catch-up. Worse still, the new connections we form in digital and hybrid spaces are often nudged by algorithms and affordances that are selected to increase engagement. These algorithms have learned that rage and partisan bickering often drive engagement. The result has been a degradation in the quality of our collective intelligences, and a subsequent global decline in democratic institutions.

At present, Project ARCH partners with small scholarly communities that are seeking to expand the frontier of knowledge. Powered by the Santa Fe Institute, our partner networks are often interdisciplinary, international, and inter-organizational communities of scholars. We provide these partners with a customizable suite of digital tools that help support their community’s intelectual inquiries, and relevant insights from complexity science. Each partner network has their own norms, and requests somewhat different affordances. We use these differences - in combination with complexity theory - to learn which sets of platform affordances and community norms promote epistemically productive discourse. We work to disseminate those insights back to our partners.