Let’s talk about trust.

All communities and organizations require some level of trust in order to properly function. Having trust within a group is what allows members to rely on each other, cooperate, and collaborate. But how do these groups actually build trust?

Communities and organizations typically have mechanisms that we call “trust frameworks”. These frameworks are what governs different community interactions, such as onboarding, membership, contributions, and acceptance of those contributions. Trust Frameworks can take many different forms; they can be unspoken norms or explicitly stated rules, documented processes or ethereal expectations, but most importantly they increase comfort and accountability within communities. Think about how the groups you’re a part of operate - what you needed to do in order to join, what traditions or rituals are observed, and how group activities are chosen, carried out, and reviewed. These are all instances of trust frameworks!

Having trust frameworks becomes even more important as communities and organizations grow. More members means more types of interactions between these members, which makes coordinating efforts more difficult. Having trust frameworks helps everyone to navigate these interactions, while establishing ways to confirm and guide contributions. Without these frameworks, communities and organizations can fall to conflict or chaos extremely quickly. Add the threat of bots and AI agents, and having robust trust frameworks are now more important than ever.

“Alright, that’s cool and all, but what’s your point?“

I’m getting to that! My point, dear esteemed and wonderful reader, is that at Govrn we’ve been thinking a lot about trust frameworks, especially in the area of community contributions. In addition to already providing bottom-up methods to manage contributions, we wanted to give communities more control over the acceptance of those contributions.

Verification Frameworks are trust frameworks for community contributions. They allow any community or organization on Govrn to create and manage their own requirements for which contributions are actually accepted into the community. This means that communities and orgs (if they want) can open themselves up to growth and more member interactions - and can do this without worrying about all of the difficulties, confusions, and chaos that comes with growth. Verification Frameworks lead to accountability at scale, and thus, trust at scale.

Also, since many communities using tech often end up getting locked into rigid requirements and rules, our frameworks are implemented in a way that is flexible and adaptable to your needs as you grow and change over time.

We’ll be building out multiple types of Verification Frameworks over time (let us know what you’d like to see!), but we’ve started off with a framework to accept contributions based on the number of attesters/attestations that they have. Simply put, this means a contribution would be accepted only once one or more people within the community (depending on the number set) have “co-signed” the contribution. Example below:

We’ve started with attestations since peer validation is an effective way to confirm that a contribution actually happened, especially when those peers have a reputation of their own. We’ll continue to update you as we add new Frameworks to the roster!

Now it’s your turn - visit govrn.app and check out these dynamic frameworks. Empower your communities and organizations, make more decisions together, embrace accountability, and create trust at scale.