About
CROW Cards helps groups — from local clubs and open science projects, to online fora and team workspaces — build intentional online spaces that can learn from, connect to, and coordinate with a broader network. Officially, we describe the cards implementing a structured data schema that provides a shared language about how communities at different scales and forms govern online interaction. Practically, the dimensions and aspects of governance the cards ask a community to describe lay out norms, rules, and processes in a consistent, legible way.
Why is this useful? Online interaction moves across many contexts, norms, and values. Just like nutrition labels help us assess varied food products or Creative Commons licenses give us a common vocabulary for sharing work online, the schema of CROW Cards help make governance of online spaces legible.
A community-based collaboration between Princeton HCI and Bonfire Networks, CROW Cards is also part of a research program on how to move toward an open web that everyday people can have a say in.
We’re working on:
- Iteratively designing the web app for generating cards
- Building a library of cards from real-world communities
- Co-designing mechanisms and tools for trust-based sharing, like sharing moderation logs and reports across communities
How it works
If you’re a group of any kind looking to manage (or already managing) an online space for your community, give us a spin!
CROW Cards will ask you to walk through core aspects of what your community does and how it operates. We recommend filling it out with others in your community, perhaps in a town hall. We also run governance workshops with communities who want our support doing this.
You’ll be able to download a card that you can display on your community and the raw JSON data that contains your answers. You’ll also be able to set how much about your governance practices you want to share publicly (i.e., to the rest of the world) versus privately (i.e., to just your community).
Finally: consider contributing your CROW Card to the open library hosted on this site for others to learn from, perhaps fork from!
Contributor Team
Contact us at: crowcards@princeton.edu
- Sohyeon Hwang (Princeton University)
- Andrés Monroy-Hernández (Princeton University)
- Prishaa Kapasi (’29, Princeton University)
- Ivan Minutillo (Bonfire Networks)
- Mayel de Borniol (Bonfire Networks)
With special thanks to past research assistants: