Online Governance Surfaces and Attention Economies Nathan Schneider, Kelsie Nabben Ronen Tamari, and Michael Zargham Metagov (metagov.org) August 23, 2025 This paper considers the intersection of governance and attention in digital contexts. In particular, it argues for the relevance of ‘attention economies’, or the analysis of human attention as a resource, to ‘governance surfaces’, or the means available for organisational adaptation and action. Existing theoretical frameworks for the governance of community-managed resources lack adequate consideration for how people’s attention is engaged and directed. To address thisgap,thispaperproposesheuristicsthatassesshowattentionrelatestogov- ernance in online organisations. The heuristics are informed by literature on attention economies and governance, as well as three case studies that consider recent attempts to address attention in the design of governance surfaces in blockchain-based systems. The resulting heuristics serve as analytical and nor- mative tools to enable researchers and system designers to better understand attention in a governance system. They invite consideration of whether the structure of attention in a system is appropriate, efficient, and just. Keywords: attention economies, blockchain, commons, governance, online communities, Web3 1 Introduction Is it possible, or even desirable, to actively participate in collective gover- nance across many arenas of our lives? Entrepreneurs and social theorists have long imagined a world in which people have the ability to co-govern organi- sations throughout society—from the nineteenth-century vision of the ‘coop- erative commonwealth’, an economy of interconnected cooperative businesses (Spann, 1989), to the more recent longing for an Internet of overlapping ‘de- centralisedautonomousorganisations’wherepeoplecollaborateonprojectsand allocate funds collectively through blockchain technology (Nabben, 2023). In some instances, people are already participating in many sites of governance, both online and off, from hobby-based communities to nation-state democracy. 1 Yet participants frequently find that the enthusiasm for shared authority and accountability come into tension with the limitations of their own attention to engage in those processes fully (Parvin, 2018). This paper considers the intersection of governance and attention in the context of online life. In particular, it assesses the relevance of ‘attention economies’,ortheanalysisofhumanattentionasaresource(Crogan&Kinsley, 2012), to digital ‘governance surfaces’, or the boundaries and actions available for organisational adaptation (Zargham & Nabben, 2022). Leading theoretical frameworksforthegovernanceofcommunity-managed‘common-poolresources’ (Ostrom, 1990), lack adequate consideration of attention. In the study of on- line communities, frameworks developed around what Yochai Benkler called ‘commons-based peer production’ (Benkler, 2006) have identified attention as a concern, but they do not theorise attention for governance design specifically. Given how central attention economies have become for the design of online platforms across many domains (Davenport & Beck, 2001; Vettehen & Schaap, 2023),thoseseekingtoenablesustainableself-governanceinonlinecommunities will need to theorise and design for attention economies as well. To address this gap, we propose a novel conceptual intervention to support future analysis and design. This paper proposes heuristics for analyzing how attention economies operate in complex governance settings. These heuristics drawinsightsfrom, first, areviewofliteraturesurroundingattentioneconomies andgovernanceand,second,threequalitativecasestudiesofattemptstoaddress attention in the design of governance surfaces. Our case studies emerge from practices surrounding blockchain technologies, which constitute an unusually activearenaofexperimentationwithonlinegovernance. Theresultingheuristics are analytical and normative tools intended to enable researchers and designers to better describe the flows and limits of attention in a governance system. They invite consideration of whether the system’s orchestration of attention is appropriate, efficient, and just. 2 Conceptual starting points This section reviews literature on the conceptual underpinnings of attention economies and governance surfaces, highlighting key themes that can inform analysis and design. Attention can be considered at various scales as both an individual and a collective resource. It can also be characterised by its properties, such as direction, distribution, and intensiveness (Carver & Scheier, 1981). For the purposes of this paper, we approach attention as the confluence of cognitive and social processes for determining what people consider worthy of time and focus. Theconceptofeconomyherereferstoflowsofvalueinasimilarlyexpansive sense of interactions, inclusive of interpersonal relationships, psychology, and the ecological context. Many accounts of economics, however, are limited to transactions, costs, and competition under conditions of scarcity (Gui, 2000). 2 While reductionism limits scope, it also opens analytic doors; both narrower and wider frames can contribute to understanding attention economies around governance. 2.1 Attention economies Political scientist Herbert Simon is often credited with introducing the idea of attention as an economy in a lecture on ‘Designing organisations for an Information-Rich World’ (Simon, 1971). After a thought experiment on let- tuce and rabbits, Simon proceeds with a basic summary: in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that informa- tion consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of informa- tion creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that at- tention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. From there Simon considers questions such as the costs of a corporate execu- tive’stimeandtheattention-costofreadinganewspaperalongsideitsmonetary subscription price. By imagining attention scarcity as a problem foremost for leaders of organisations, Simon presents this scarcity as a matter of governance from the outset. He contends that organisations should be designed around informationprocessing,soastoreduce‘informationoverload’with‘athorough- going application of price and market mechanisms’ (Simon, 1971). As personal computers and multimedia applications proliferated, computer scientistMarkWeiserwasearlytorecognisetheirpropensityto‘grabattention’ fromtheirusers(Weiser,1993). WeiserandcolleaguesatXeroxPARCproposed toaddressthiswithinterventionssuchastheconceptsof‘ubiquitouscomputing’ and ‘calm technology’, which sought to mitigate the demands of attention by making devices more immersive or more peripheral, respectively, to their users (Weiser, 1993; Weiser & Brown, 1995). Weiser and others thus recognised the need to design technologies in ways that reflected an ethical orientation toward users’ attention. In1997,physicistandconsultantMichaelH.Goldhaberpopularisedtheterm ‘attentioneconomy’duringtheearlyyearsoftheWorldWideWeb(Goldhaber, 1997a, 1997b). Goldhaber expressed concerns about inequalities of access to attention, as well as the abuses of power an attention economy could enable. While Simon focused his concern with attention on the managerial elite, Gold- haber imagined its effects on the masses of current and future Internet users. Attention became more evident as a concern in the age of computers, but its importance didn’t begin there. A few years before Goldhaber’s work on the subject, in the context of cinema, media scholar Jonathan L. Beller outlined an ‘attentiontheoryofvalue’(Beller,1994),weddingattentioneconomicstoMarx- ian analysis as ‘the newest source of value production under capitalism today’ 3 (Beller, 2006). The concept has attracted interest in a range of fields: for in- stance, anthropology (Pedersen, Albris, & Seaver, 2021), economics (Falkinger, 2007),law(Wu,2017),literature(Lanham,2006),andsociology(Franck,2019). ‘Attention economy’ has meanwhile become popular business jargon in subcul- turessurroundingtechnologydesignandstartups,referringtohowattentioncan be captured and monetised (Davenport & Beck, 2001). In all of these contexts, peoplehavefoundvalueinrecognisingattentionasascarceandevencalculable resource, subject to flows of supply and demand. Some scholars, however, have raised concerns about economising attention. Perhaps the origins of their critiques can be found in Simon’s 1971 lecture, in which he asserts a view that ‘human beings, like contemporary computers, are essentially serial devices’ (Simon, 1971)—that is, machines that process information one bit at a time. While this may be a useful approximation, human attention involves social and psychological dynamics that the metaphor does not reflect. For instance, cultural theorist Tiziana Terranova (Terranova, 2012)resistsamechanisticviewofattentioninfavorofonemoreattunedtothe intersubjectivity of social experience. ‘Theories of the attention economy’, she writes, appear locked within the limits of scarcity, unable to account for thepowersofinventionofnetworkedsubjectivities, fallingbackinto ‘herd-like’ models of connected sociality, and delegating to specula- tive mechanisms of financialization the capacity to create value out of partial attention and continuous distraction. Terranova’s concern about ‘the limits of scarcity’ reflects a broader concern of feminist thought about the over-identification of economics with competition over scarce resources (Bucher, 2012), rather than recognising the possibilities that can emerge through cooperation. Attention can be scarce individually but surprisingly abundant when organised collectively. For instance, crowdsourced volunteer attention on platforms like Wikipedia can outperform encyclopedias written by paid experts. Yet the gendered disparities in who edits and appears on Wikipedia is a reminder that abundance has limits, too, and collective at- tention will not necessarily produce equity without intentional design (Shaw & Hargittai, 2018). Feministthoughtadditionallyinvitesconsiderationoftheinvisibilisedlabour in attention economies. Women have often faced expectations of working in ways that the dominant economy regards as less valuable or significant than the work that men do (Nagbot, 2016). If ‘to look is to labour’, as Beller sug- gests (Beller, 1994), then attention economies risk subjugating certain sorts of attention-labour along lines of gender, race, and other received hierarchies. At one extreme, marginalised groups may be systematically excluded from gover- nance and, at the other extreme, their attention to governance may be inade- quately respected or compensated. Thedesignofattentioninfrastructurethushasmoralimport, bothforusers and designers. Georgi Gardiner has argued, for instance, that there are virtues 4 and vices associated with attention allocation among individuals and groups (Gardiner, 2022). Seth Lazar further articulates ‘the distribution of attention’ in online contexts as a matter of ‘communicative justice’ (Lazar, 2023); evalu- atingquestionsofjustice,Lazarargues,requiresgreaterclaritythanistypically available about how online systems distribute both the burdens and benefits of attention. 2.2 Governance surfaces ZarghamandNabbendefine‘governancesurfaces’as‘thesetofactionsavailable to an organisation which allow it to adapt itself’, including the processes for changing those processes (Zargham & Nabben, 2022). This concept is related towhatElinorOstromdescribesasthe‘actionarena’forgovernanceactions;the action arena includes broader considerations such as participants’ relationships and ‘the biophysical world’ (Ostrom, 2006). As shown in Figure 1, participants intheactionarenaarebothenabledandconstrainedbythegovernancesurfaces availabletothem. Inshort,governancesurfacesdeterminehowanorganisation’s collective self-attention may (or may not) be converted into changes to that organisation. Figure 1: Dynamics of participatory governance as mediated by a governance surface. Participants allocate attention to governance related tasks (e.g., writ- ing or voting on proposals). The outcome of the process results in potential outcomes for the participant (e.g., reputation increase), the system being gov- erned (e.g., allocation of funds to a project), and external stakeholders (e.g., whoever benefits from the project’s implementation). The governance of online communities has been an ongoing interest among researchers and practitioners. Studies have analyzed practices of participa- tory governance on particular platforms, highlighting the dynamic relationship between user behavior and software design (Fiesler, Jiang, McCann, Frye, & Brubaker, n.d.; Seering, Wang, Yoon, & Kaufman, n.d.). More recently, schol- arshaveidentified theneed for moreintentionaldevelopment oftoolsfor online 5 self-governance (Schneider, 2024; Seering, n.d.), and a growing literature ex- plorespotentialstrategiesfordevelopingsuchtools(Schneider,DeFilippi,Frey, Tan,&Zhang,2021). PioneeringtoolsincludeLoomio,whichfacilitatesdiverse formsofdecision-makingindiscussionforums,andDecidim,designedprimarily for citizen participation in municipal governments. However, such tools are ex- ceptionstothenormandthepossibilitiesofonlinegovernanceappeartoremain largely unexplored. 2.3 Attention and online commons Onlineplatformshavefrequentlybeencharacterisedascommonsinthespiritof Elinor Ostrom and her school of ‘Institutional Analysis and Design’ (Benkler, 2006; Murtazashvili, Murtazashvili, Weiss, & Madison, 2022; Rozas, Tenorio- Forn´es, & Hassan, 2021). While Ostrom studied pre-digital communities and physical resources such as fisheries and water sources, networked information technologies have since dramatically changed the nature of both the common resources as well as the communities governing them. Later research focused on digital communities and more abstract resources like knowledge (Hess & Ostrom, 2006). Building on Ostrom’s legacy, Yochai Benkler introduced the concept of ‘commons-basedpeer-production’todescribehowlargenumbersofpeoplework collaboratively on public goods over the Internet (Benkler, 2002, 2006). In his initial formulation of the concept, he equated attention in online communi- ties with the fundamental flows of business economics. ‘The human attention required’ in collaborative communities, he wrote, ‘are the equivalent for peer production of organization/decision costs in firms and of transaction costs in markets’ (Benkler, 2002). Benkler focuses on the attention economies of dis- course and contribution, but he does not similarly probe the role of attention in governance. Generally, Benkler envisioned increasing returns to scale for the number of communities, projects, and resources available (Benkler & Nis- senbaum, 2006). Yet Benkler also recognised, in the first formulation of commons-based peer production, that ‘adding agents increases the coordination and communication costs’ (Benkler, 2002). More recently, institutional economist Eric Alston has argued that such increases in organisational scale are precisely those which drive the necessity of more complex institutions to regulate participant activi- ties (Alston, 2022). Centrally managed platforms emerged, at least in part, to administer the organisational complexity required for managing digital spaces. For-profitplatformsrepresentaparticulartypeofsolutionforhowtoallevi- ate attention overload in communities as they grow in scale and diversity—by enabling users to largely outsource their governance duties and attention man- agement to the platform, at the cost of degrading user agency and autonomy. Legal scholar Tim Wu coined the term ‘tyranny of convenience’ to describe the tendency for ease-of-use to prevail over other concerns such as privacy and ac- countability: ‘Createdtofreeus,[convenience]canbecomeaconstraintonwhat we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us’ (Wu, 2018). 6 A wide-ranging taxonomy of online participation identifies attention as consti- tutive of any participatory community, while also observing that many users are unaware of the value of their attention investment (Fish, Murillo, Nguyen, Panofsky, & Kelty, 2011). Achieving more equitable and sustainable commons, it seems, will require more carefully accounting for the flows of attention. 2.4 Attention and governance Theintersectionofattentionandgovernancehaslongbeenofinteresttopolitical scientistsandeconomists,albeitnotnecessarilyemployingtheconceptofatten- tion explicitly. Recent critiques of participatory democracy have stressed the inequalities of participation in existing political systems (Parvin, 2018); people with less access to free time and educational preparation, for instance, appear less likely to attend meetings, vote, and devote the attention that effective po- litical engagement requires. In corporate settings, economists have theorised the pursuit of attention-related efficiencies, such as reducing the costs of effec- tive delegation and monitoring (Hansmann, 1996); scholars have also observed heterogeneitiesinhowinvestorstypicallydirectattentiontotheoversightofcer- tain kinds of firms while neglecting others (Iliev, Kalodimos, & Lowry, 2021). Both governments and corporations have already had opportunities to consider attention economies in the design of their governance surfaces. The intersection of governance and attention remains comparatively under- explored in the context of online platforms. Studies touch on this intersection implicitly, such as when examining the intensiveness of volunteer moderation labour (Seering et al., n.d.) or proposing digital tools to streamline participa- tion in governmental processes (Jasim et al., n.d.). Yet such research assumes that digital systems function as attention allocators on behalf of goals deter- mined by corporate leaders or policymakers, not by and for online communities themselves. Thispaperseekstoextendexplorationsofattentiontothedesignof governance surfaces in participatory online spaces where users have meaningful opportunities for decision-making and accountability. Recent efforts to advance decentralising technologies, such as blockchains and federated social networks (Nabben, 2023; Nicholson, Keegan, & Fiesler, n.d.), have brought about new opportunities for online participatory gover- nance—along with new demands on users’ attention. These efforts have also occasioned a resurgence of interest in commons research (Murtazashvili et al., 2022; Rozas et al., 2021). Communities not content to cede governance to plat- form operators will have to design systems that allocate governance attention among their members (Tamari, Friedman, Fischer, Hebert, & Shahaf, 2022). This is the challenge that the heuristics provided in this paper support. 3 Case studies Thissectionpresentsqualitativecasestudies,guidedbythepremisethatcontext- sensitiveanalysiscanyieldinsightsnototherwiseaccessiblethroughbroadcom- 7 parative or quantitative methods (Flyvbjerg, 2006). Case studies are particu- larly valuable in exploring complex social, technical, or organisational phenom- ena in situ, especially when the boundaries between the phenomenon and its context are not clearly delineated. Each case provides an attempt to wrestle with challenges of attention economies in online governance. The cases considered here all engage with the blockchain-related technolo- gies that practitioners refer to colloquially as ‘Web3’. We focus on this do- main because, regardless of the self-contradictions and financial frauds that have attended Web3, it has constituted a uniquely generative ‘pioneer com- munity’ (Hepp, 2016) for experimentation in online self-governance. Whereas conventional Internet platforms ultimately defer to the governance of whatever corporate entities own their servers, blockchains typically require some form of co-governance among their users to ‘decentralise’ authority over a shared plat- form. Blockchains can also serve as the basis for programmable digital tokens, which can be designed for a variety of purposes, such as providing voting rights in a digital organisation. With these affordances, Web3 technologies have en- couraged a uniquely energetic practice of ‘self-infrastructuring’ for governance (Nabben, 2023)—that is, the design of technologies designed to improve the experience of necessary governance tasks. A unifying concept among these in- frastructures is the aspiration of enacting a ‘decentralised autonomous organi- sation’, or DAO: a blockchain-based system that enables people to coordinate and governthemselvesmediatedbyasetofself-executingrulesdeployed on a public blockchain, and whose governance is decentralised (i.e., independent from central control). (Hassan & De Filippi, n.d.) The case studies were selected from among Web3 projects that reflect distinct approaches to questions of attention. We looked for patterns that recur across thesedistinctapproaches. Weinterrogatedeachcasethroughpubliclyavailable documents, earlier studies, participant observation, and correspondence with core participants who agreed to be quoted and named. One of the authors is registered(butlonginactive)asaGitcoinSteward,andtwoworkforacompany that has contracted with GitcoinDAO; another author was formerly employed by DAOstack. For the purposes of developing a set of heuristics on a little- studied topic, we determined that a high-context examination of cases would be more instructive than attempting to identify patterns across a large dataset. By choosing case studies in a common cultural and technological milieu, we maintained a focus on comparing their strategies around attention. Our observations occur in Web3 spaces where participants have unusually meaningful opportunities to engage in governance. In principle, however, the governance mechanisms in these cases could be implemented in non-blockchain infrastructures. For instance, if social-media or gig-economy platforms enabled groups of users to make collective decisions over shared resource treasuries, or even co-govern the platforms themselves, many of the dynamics in Web3 contexts would likely arise there as well. By and large, however, community 8 governance in dominant platform amounts to centralised control by platforms or users with special ‘admin’ roles (Schneider, 2024). While the insights we extrapolate could be transferable to non-Web3 contexts where community gov- ernanceoccurs, wecontendthatWeb3casesareuniquelyrelevantforthestudy of online self-governance in practice. 3.1 DAOstack: Incentivising Attention Atatimewhenearlyadopterswereanticipatingthechallengesofgovernancein largeDAOs,thetechnologystartupDAOstackemergedwithaproposalforhow to channel attention through incentive design. DAOstack raised an equivalent of $30 million in a 2018 public sale of its digital token, GEN, with an ob- jective of ‘building an operating system for collective intelligence’ (DAOstack, 2018). Specifically, DAOstack proposed to achieve this objective by facilitat- ing decision-making for large-scale DAOs, in which many thousands of partic- ipants would be attempting to coordinate their actions in an online environ- ment. DAOstack identified the effective management of human attention as a key challenge to address, in what the project founders called the ‘decentral- ized governance scalability problem’. The problem is described in the project’s whitepaper (DAOstack, 2018), which follows Simon in likening attention to computation: The scalability of a decentralized governance system is in inherent tension with its resilience. [...] By resilience we mean that we need enough participants to review every decision. But this is clearly in tension with the scarce resource of participants’ attention, whether it is computing power—in the case of blockchain, or human atten- tion—in case of DAO governance. In DAOstack’s model, the governance surface of a DAO consists of proposal processing: members create proposals which are then reviewed and voted upon by other members. The model regards attention as a controllable resource, and it construes the scalability problem as a matter of optimising the allocation of attention resources to the processing of governance proposals. DAOstack’s intervention was to add one further form of participation: the ability to stake tokens to ‘boost’ the visibility of proposals. DAOstackcalleditssolutionforattentionoptimization‘holographicconsen- sus’ (HC) (Faqir-Rhazoui, Arroyo, & Hassan, 2021). HC creates a prediction market, in which tokens can be staked to represent a bet on a proposal’s even- tual outcome in a token-holder vote. Staking increases a proposal’s prominence for other DAO members, thus inviting them to review and vote on it. In this system, rational stakers should theoretically bet on proposals they predict will pass, since they will lose their stake if the proposal doesn’t pass and reap a re- wardifitdoes. Boostedproposalsalsorequirefewervotestopass,whichfurther preserves community attention, since fewer members need to invest attention in voting. Non-boosted proposals require a full majority vote, and thus more 9 attentionfromthemembership,reflectingthepredictionthattheywillnotpass so easily. Ultimately, the mechanism directs short-term attention to fast-track proposals likely to be successful, while preserving longer-term attention, among more members, for more contentious decisions. HC has been implemented and deployed in over 20 DAOs (Faqir-Rhazoui et al.,2021). Thefirsttestcase,GenesisDAO,wascreatedinearly2019togovern the DAOstack project itself (El Faqir, Arroyo, & Hassan, 2020). Tokens were issuedatfirsttotrustedparticipantsintheDAOstackecosystem. Tokenholders voted on decisions largely related to allocating tokens for the development and adoption of DAOstack. Genesis DAO attracted around 100 active members at its peak in late 2019—a signal of some initial interest, but short of the scale that DAOStack’s technology was designed to address. Over the course of 2020, however, a number of interrelated factors contributed to participation declining to a halt. Interviews with DAOstack employees, as well as the observations of Genesis DAO community managers (Brekke, Beecroft, & Pick, 2021), suggest that the emphasis on allocating funds through proposals and DAOstack’s tools came at the expense of other kinds of community building activities. This was additionally compounded by the limitations of the software in providing other interaction affordances such as deliberative discussion. These factors, combinedwiththefactthatproposalswereexecutedautomatically(whetheror not deliberation happened), instilled a sense that conversations weren’t valued, leading to disengagement of members. Finally, a lack of an overarching mission for Genesis DAO (aside from funding proposals with the tool) hindered group cohesion. TheHCmechanismmaybeusefulaspartofamorecomprehesivegovernance surface or in other settings that more closely align with its assumptions about scale and community interaction patterns. But this early experiment suggests that the financialization of attention in the governance of online communities can backfire. 3.2 Gitcoin Stewards: Attention delegation Gitcoin is a crowdfunding platform that, in 2021, became controlled by Git- coinDAO, an entity governed by holders of the GTC token on the Ethereum blockchain(Owocki,2021). Userscouldobtaintokenseitherbypurchasingthem oncryptocurrencyexchangesorthroughtheinitial‘airdrop’processthatissued tokenstoearlyusers,contributors,andinvestors. Sinceitsinception,theDAO’s online user-interface encouraged GTC holders to delegate their voting power to ‘Stewards’,orholderswhonominatedthemselvestobeactive,volunteerpartici- pantsingoverningtheDAO.Participationinvolvedfollowingintensiveproposal discussions on an online forum and casting votes on proposals. This delegation strategy implemented a concept known as ‘liquid democracy’, in which voters can assign authority to trusted others, and withdraw that assignment at any time (Blum & Zuber, 2016). Liquid democracy represents a blend between di- rectdemocracy(inwhichallvotershaveasayinalldecisions)andrepresentative democracy (in which voters nominate representatives to carry out governance 10 labourontheirbehalf). Onewayofdescribingthepurposeofliquiddemocracy istoorganiseattentionsothataminorityofmotivatedpeoplecancommithigh levels of attention while remaining accountable to the low-attention majority. Over time, however, GitcoinDAO encountered attention-related challenges. TheDAOhashadtocontinuallyadjustitstechnicalandorganisationalpractices toincentiviseandsupportStewardattentionfornecessarygovernanceactivities. GitcoinDAO is a complex organisation with numerous employees and a far largernumberofpeoplewhousetheGitcoinplatformorholditstokens. Inad- ditiontotheDAO’sownforumandchatspace, muchoftheconversationabout its governance occurs on public social-media platforms, drawing attention and input from people who may not be DAO members. Yet many of the propos- als that go before its token-holders, and particularly its Stewards, require the comprehension of significant context in order to make informed decisions. Pro- posals may represent funding allocations for projects or ongoing activities that are only part of a larger budgetary picture, or treasury-management decisions that would normally be the purview of financial professionals. Other propos- als involve software modifications for which an informed decision may require reviewing source code. EarlyonitbecameclearthattheStewards,tosaynothingofallGTCtoken- holders, lacked the expertise to contribute effectively to governance. According toaleadingparticipantintheDAO,ScottMoore,‘TheStewardsthatweremost active weren’t necessarily prepared to address these decisions’ (Moore, 2023). Addsanotherleadingparticipant,SimonaPop,‘Itbecameakeymovetoensure we didn’t just focus on token weight but on actual engagement’ (S. Pop, 2023). Consequently, an informal group of GitcoinDAO members undertook efforts to augmentthedelegationsystemwithaseriesofsocialandtechnicaladjustments. Within a few months of GitcoinDAO’s launch, in 2021, it introduced ‘Steward Health Cards’, a website that ranked Stewards according to certain metrics of participation in governance (Fred, 2021). This model has since been adopted morewidelyintheindustry. Ontheoperationsside,theDAOdividedactivities into ‘workstreams’—a kind of rebranding of corporate departments or business units for a fluid, virtual workplace. Thefollowingyear,GitcoinDAOcreatedtheStewardCouncil,anentitythat invitesStewardstoparticipateinastructuredgovernanceexperience,including regular ‘sync calls’ and other interpersonal activities to more intentionally or- ganise the attention of leading Stewards (Pop, 2021). Members of the Steward Councilarecompensatedfortheirextraattentiontogovernancelabour. Atthe beginningof2023,GitcoinDAObeganissuingtheGitcoinOutstandingSteward Award to further incentivise Steward initiative and compensate reputationally for Steward engagement (Gitcoin, 2023). TakingstepslikethesewasnotuniversallypopularintheDAO,asmembers perceived the reforms as centralising power and eroding collective governance. But, according to Moore at least, the attention-management reforms were nec- essary and effective in at least mitigating the challenges of DAO governance. Notably, Gitcoin’s practices have been copied by more recently created DAOs. Liquid democracy is intended to bring efficient attention allocation to a di- 11

rect democracy. It assumes that commanding additional voting power provides the incentive necessary for delegates to contribute unusually high levels of at- tentiontogovernance. ThisattentioneconomicsprovedinsufficientforGitcoin- DAO. The organisation had to augment that system with additional provisions to support Stewards in directing adequate attention to their roles, as well as to more intentionally coordinate operational attention through workstreams. These provisions included issuing reputational capital (scorecards and awards), establishingtight-knitgroups(aboard-likeCouncilandworkstreams),andpro- vidingdirectfinancialsupport. Forthecomputationalandeconomicgovernance mechanismstofunctionproperly,theyneededbuttressingwithsocialstructures. 3.3 Governatooorr AI Agent: Attention Automation Thefocusofthiscasestudyisoutsourcingattentionthroughautomation. Gov- ernatooorr is an AI agent that acts as a personal governance delegate. Accord- ing to Olas, the team behind Governatooorr, a major problem in DAOs is that ‘governance is overwhelming’ (valoryag, 2023). Governatooorr began as a playful idea at a hackathon. According to a blog postbythefounders,‘Thislight-heartedservice’sdesigntechnicallycouldmean humansnolongerneedtoreadgovernanceproposalstovoteanddecideorgani- sations’outcomes’(AG,2023b). Valory’sinitialgoalwastousethetooltopro- voke discussion about how AI might benefit humankind. Now, Governatooorr isbeingpositionedasanAIsolutiontoaddresstheproblemoftheattentionre- quiredtoparticipateingovernance. Thefounderspresentitas‘anautonomous, AI-powered delegate for DAO governance’ (AG, 2023b). Governatooorr leverages OpenAI’s ChatGPT within a software framework for managing off-chain processes called ‘Autonolas’. Governatooorr works as follows: (1) the user connects their cryptocurrency wallet and delegates their governancerightsinacertainDAO,(2)transferscryptocurrencytokenstoGov- ernatooorr to pay for the service, and (3) then chooses its setting (in the initial version, either a binary ‘good’ for acting in favor of governance proposals or ‘evil’ to bias toward rejecting governance proposals). Finally, (4) the AI agent uses the stated settings to infer the user’s preferences about DAO governance proposals. Governatooorr then operates autonomously to execute its vote with theuser’stokens,asthereiscurrentlynooptionforhumanoperatorstobekept intheloop. ThemechanismreducesAIagentoversighttobinarypreferencesin a manner that minimises meaningful control over the Governatooorr instance. TheambitionofautomationalignswiththeconceptinWeb3culturesof‘gov- ernance minimization’ (Ehrsam, 2020), which seeks to reduce the need for hu- maninvolvementingovernanceactivitieswhereverpossible. Governatooorrhas consequentlygarneredinterestfromvariouscryptopersonalitiesandconference- awardnominations. Itisbeingdevelopedintoafull-scaleproductofferingbythe company Olas, whose stated mission is to ‘enable communities, organisations and countries to co-own AI systems, beginning with decentralized autonomous agents’ (AG, 2023a). According to one DAO, AI agents like Governatooorr are ‘revolutionizing’ delegative voting and decision making (metropolis dao, 2023). 12 Governatooorr’sdevelopersbelievethatsoftwareautomationwilldirectpeo- ple’s attention toward higher-order, meaningful tasks, thus boosting productiv- ity and improving coordination. According to cofounder Oaksprout, ‘I believe the promise of AI agents is actually in scaling and improving the efficacy of human attention’ (Oaksprout, 2023). Oaksprout adds that doing so requires shifting human attention up a level from manual review, discussion, and execu- tion, and thus to extend the ‘output per unit of human attention’. The use of Governatooorr redirects human attention from the governance surface of the DAO to the governance surface of the AI agent. The intention behindthedevelopmentofsuchsystemsisthat,eventually,AIwilloperatemore andmoreautonomously,inlinewiththeinterestsofitsdeployer. Theoperator’s attention is theoretically emancipated to focus on other things. Yet the redi- rection of attention might also detract from critical components of governance, such as collective deliberation and trust-building through human relationships (Nabben & Zargham, 2023). 3.4 Observations These case studies reveal how the role of attention in governance is a recurring preoccupation for some contemporary designers of participatory online spaces. Designers attempt to respond to the challenges they perceive in various ways. Despitetheabsenceofdiscussionaboutattentionandgovernanceintheexisting literature, the field of practice indicates that this intersection deserves further investigation. Theproliferationofactivitywithinandacrossdigitalorganisations, coupled with humans’ finite capacity for attention, combine to risk a kind of partici- pation overload akin to the risk of information overload identified by Herbert Simon(Simon,1971). WhileSimon’saccountcentersexecutivemanagers,these casestudiesreflectconcernsfororganisationswithwidelydistributedgovernance rights. The people behind each of the cases regard overloading participants’ at- tention in governance as a problem needing novel solutions. They perceive that governance‘consumes’attention,lendingutilitytothestandardeconomicfram- ing of attention as a valuable finite resource to be managed (Falkinger, 2007). However, finding the right match between attention economies and governance surfaces seems to be a persistent challenge. In the context of GitcoinDAO, the initial designers seem to have inade- quately mapped the flows of attention necessary for governance. The infras- tructural processes they put in place—namely, delegative voting—were unable to support the attention that governance would require. This is why leaders sought to secure investments of attention among leading Stewards by awarding them social capital and organising peer pressure through the Council. While DAOstackestablishedintentionalincentivestosupportattentiontogovernance for a large-scale DAO, that design did not seem useful to users at earlier stages of a DAO’s evolution, when participants sought more relational forms of co- ordination. The AI-based decision-making of Governatoorr provides a process designed to minimise the requirements of participant attention, but in the pro- 13 Figure 2: Potentially attention-saving governance interventions introduce com- plexity to the governance surface in the form of additional processes or mecha- nisms that must be supervised or maintained, respectively. cess it introduces new obligations—configuring the AI agent and managing the complexities involved in its operation. Taken together, the cases demonstrate that ingenuity in system design can arise from considering attention as an economy in the context of governance, but best practices have yet to be identified. While each design intervention introducesadditionalmechanismstoreducetheattentioncostsforparticipants, as shown in Figure 2, the interventions may merely redirect the attention costs associated with the design, operation, and maintenance of the mechanisms. It is not clear from the case studies the extent to which these interventions result in a net reduction of attention costs on the participants. The search for best practices can benefit from clearer thinking about how attention economies and governance surfaces intersect. 4 Heuristics for attention in governance To augment existing literature on the governance of commons and online com- munities, and drawing on the preceding case studies, we propose the following heuristicsfortheanalysisanddesignofattentioneconomiesasmediatedbygov- ernance surfaces. The heuristics consist of five questions that researchers and designers might ask about the flows of attention around governance surfaces. We expect that designers will have to make context-sensitive tradeoffs among the considerations that these heuristics raise; researchers will inevitably choose to focus on some and not others. Modes: What kinds of activities require attention for the governance of the organisation? Modes of attention refer to the various kinds of par- ticipation the system requires for its governance. In each of the case studies, 14 organisationsrequireparticipantstoinvestattentioninreviewingproposalsthat could be approved by a member vote; DAOstack, for instance, encourages a di- vision of labour between attention for sorting through many proposals and at- tentionforvotingonthem. Anykindofattentioncanalsovarybydegree—that is, quantity or intensity. The degree of attention can be characterised in eco- nomic terms as the attention cost. The degree of attention a particular type of participationrequiresfurtherdependsonaparticipant’sexperienceortraining; proposal review might require less attention from an experienced participant than from a novice. In general, different actors will have differing preferences and competencies with respect to different modes of participation. Processes: What organisational and technical processes manage at- tention around the governance of the system? A combination of pro- cesses mediate attention across governance surfaces. These processes arise through organisational structure, such as hierarchies of authority and social norms, as well as technical systems, such as communications interfaces and decision-making methods. While the role of attention is often implicit, in each of the case studies, participants seek to explicitly redirect attention through software automation. The cases also show how organisational and technical processes mutually shape and constrain each other; for example, voting delega- tion, as in GitcoinDAO, is influenced by distributions of social capital among members. This process does not, however, attempt to make that distribution representative demographically, geographically, or in terms of various skill-sets. Processes that distribute attention raise questions of fairness and justice. Information: What information is available to participants, and how does it affect the expectations placed on their attention? Informed participation in governance requires knowledge that lies beyond any one par- ticipant’s purview. Depending on the organisation, information relevant for governance may come in large or small quantities, and it may be available in ways that are highly accessible or that require considerable labour for interpre- tation. A highly transparent organisation might provide extensive information, which however incurs high attention costs for participants to examine and in- terpret; as Beller put it, ‘to look is to labour’ (Beller, 1994). An AI-aided governance system, conversely, may require lower attention costs to access in- formation, but the assumptions underlying the AI may be inaccessible to users. The legibility of information is thus an important variable in the attention eco- nomics of a governance surface. Choices about disclosure are also value-laden. TheGitcoinDAOscorecardsystemmakescertaininformationaccessibleinorder to ease decision-making but introduces assumptions regarding what to measure and how to measure it. Incentives: What are the costs and benefits for various participants to invest attention in governance? Organisationsoftenseektoincentivise participants to incur attention costs willingly. The incentives for governance 15 participationcantakediverseforms—notonlypersonalbenefitsbutalsocollec- tivebenefitstotheorganisationorabroadercommunity. Forexample,hostinga community gathering to discuss a contentious issue may result in high personal cost and low personal benefit while being highly valuable to the community. DAOstack, in contrast, aimed to incentivise attention through individual fi- nancial benefit. Characterising attention costs and benefits naturally invites a consideration of the ratio between them—a return on attention. When partici- pants perceive a high return on attention, communities will presumably attract active involvement in governance. Attention from others can itself be an in- centive for participation (Srinivasan, 2023). Conversely, communities will have troubleattractingparticipationifthereturnonattentionisperceivedtobelow. It is important to be wary of high expectations of attention from groups who do not experience commensurate benefit from their contributions, as feminist scholarship has long taught (Nagbot, 2016). Feedback: How does attention to past outcomes influence future at- tention allocation and an organisation’s subsequent evolution? Hu- man institutions are dynamical systems, meaning that their past outcomes be- come feedback that affect their future behavior. Thus, the analysis of attention economiesrequiresarecognitionofhowtheyoperatewithinanevolvinginstitu- tional context. Participants allocate attention to governance with intent (or at least preferences) to guide the evolution of the organisation. Systems scientist JayForresterdemonstratedthatfeedbackmechanismscreateunintuitivebehav- iorswithinsocialsystems,buttheyarealsotoolsthatcanassessandsteerthose systems toward intended outcomes (Forrester, 1971). A governance surface can allocate attention to generate feedback for improving its own operations. This is what leaders in GitcoinDAO discovered, and they adapted their governance surface in several ways accordingly. 5 Discussion These heuristics are a starting point for filling a gap in existing frameworks for participatory governance, such as those of Ostrom and Benkler. Given the longstandinganxietiesaboutattentioninthecontextsofonlineinstitutions, we contend it is necessary to more intentionally theorise the dynamics of atten- tion in the design of online governance systems. These heuristics can do so by complementing existing approaches. Ostrom’s principles for governing common-pool resources include expecta- tions of participant engagement in rule-making, the monitoring of participant behavior, andprocessesfordisputeresolution(Ostrom, 1990); ensuringthatall of these are both efficient and equitable requires considering how they each ex- pectandallocateattention. Inthislight,also,Ostrom’sobservationthatgover- nancesystemstendtobenestedfordifferentscalesofactivitycanberecognised as a kind of attention economy. The heuristics above introduce questions of at- tention that are relevant at every stage of Ostrom’s governance framework. For 16 instance, effective monitoring requires systems for managing attention around information flows; dispute resolution requires ensuring that sufficient attention is available to meet community expectations for due process. These heuristics also help connect research on online attention economies withonlinegovernancespecifically. Greaterspecificityaboutmodes,incentives, and processes of attention can aid in resolving the apparent contradiction dis- cussed above between Benkler’s embrace of widespread peer production along- side the limits that attention economies are likely to impose. Further, while the participation model of Fish et al. broadly recognises the value of attention invested in online commons (Fish et al., 2011), it does not distinguish between the modes of attention invested or the processes mediating attention in digital contexts. Additionally, accounting for the distribution of attention among par- ticipantscanhelpsurfacepreviouslyunnoticedflowsandsinks,thusencouraging more sustainable design of incentives for governance attention in communities. Jonathan Zittrain identifies factors underlying what he calls ‘generative’ tech- nological systems, such as ease of contribution, accessibility, and the leverage to make work easier (Zittrain, 2008); these heuristics can assist designers in lowering participation costs and increasing the benefits to participants of the attention they invest. In our case studies, the online governance surfaces rely heavily on computer systems to mediate their attention economies. Returning to the principles of calm technology provides guidance: computer systems should remain in ‘the periphery’ of human attention, where they can be ‘informing without overbur- dening’ (Tugui, 2004). Taken together, our heuristics offer a perspective on online governance surfaces which aids in placing them in the periphery relative to the relational dynamics of participant attention. Finally, our heuristics suggest insights for squaring Benkler’s vision of an ecosystem of online commons with the limitations of participants’ attention. In particular, ecosystems can streamline participant governance by more inten- tionallydesigningthemodes,processes,andincentivesofattention. Generative AI provides an intriguing glimpse of technology that remixes and repurposes attention invested in the context of specific communities to benefit many other communities(Zargham&Ben-Meir,2023). Asdiscussedabove,AIautomations are far from fail-proof and themselves introduce new governance surfaces. Ac- cordingly, communities will need to navigate the cost-benefit tradeoffs involved with their use. Finding durable answers begins with asking the right questions. If online spaces are to become more governable by their participants, heuristics such as these are a starting point for understanding how attention functions in gov- ernance and for designing governance surfaces to mediate attention economies more efficiently and fairly. 17 6 Conclusions This paper has argued for the need to theorise the role of attention economies in the governance surfaces for online communities co-governed by their partici- pants. Earlier studies on community governance, along with the leading frame- worksforgoverningcommons,haveyettoaddressattentionexplicitly. Ourcase study analysis revealed that when online communities gain the capacity to self- govern, managing attention becomes a pressing concern that participants seek to address in diverse ways. The heuristics for conceptualising attention in the context of online self-governance provide a framework support future research and design. Further work could develop these heuristics based on insights from online governance systems under diverse conditions, beyond the Web3 case studies provided. In particular, it may be constructive to map the flows of attention more systematically, across a wider range of cases, and to identify ways of specifyingtherisksofinequitabledistributionsofattentionandrespondingwith designs more conducive to participants’ needs. With future experimentation andstudy,theheuristicspresentedherecanprovideafoundationforactionable lessons and best practices. Thispaperhasofferedtherecognitionthatattentionisacrucialconceptfor theanalysisanddesignofgovernancesystems,bothonlineandoffline. Examin- ing attention economies more intentionally can inform the design of governance surfacesthatbettersharethepower,labour,andbenefitsofonlinecommunities. References AG, V. (2023a). Architecting Autonomy — valory.xyz. https://www.valory .xyz/. ([Accessed 15-01-2024]) AG, V. (2023b, April). 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