CONCEPT
Community Governance of Technology
Local decision-making authority over technological systems—the third governance model beyond corporate self-regulation and state oversight, built from below.
Community governance positions affected populations as primary authorities over technology deployed in their contexts—determining which tools to adopt, how to configure them, what data to share, what limits to set, and what outcomes to prioritize.
Ramesh Srinivasan's framework, developed through fieldwork with indigenous communities and urban cooperatives, argues that neither corporate self-regulation nor state policy adequately addresses the question of local agency. Corporations optimize for shareholder returns; states apply uniform rules across diverse conditions. Communities possess the contextual knowledge necessary to govern technology appropriately for their specific circumstances—and possess governance traditions, from indigenous assemblies to cooperative decision-making, that predate the nation-state and have proven capacity to manage complex shared resources.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Oaxacan cellular networks Srinivasan documented were governed through traditional community assemblies—the same structures that managed communal land, water, and labor for centuries. These assemblies made all major decisions about the networks: pricing, coverage expansion, access policies, dispute resolution. The governance was not imported from external templates but adapted from existing practice. The communities already knew how to make