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 as implementing a structured data schema that provides a shared language about how communities at different scales and forms govern online interaction. Practically, the the cards ask a community to lay out governing norms, rules, and processes in a consistent and parsimonious way.
We all intuitively know that 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 framework for sharing work, the schema of CROW Cards helps to make the governance of online spaces legible.
Look at Documentation to read the technical details.
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 trust and 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 or another deliberative process. 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!
Making of
The idea for CROW Cards came out of a series of design workshops that we hosted in 2025, which were reported in a research paper presented at an academic conference, CHI 2026. We developed an initial schema from the research team's expertise in studying governance in online communities, which was then implemented as a prototype by a student team partnering with Bonfire Networks through an undergraduate class at Princeton.
We've been iterating through feedback interviews with folks as well as insights from other exciting projects like CommunityRule by Metagov. Get in touch if you'd like to partner, collaborate, or otherwise share thoughts!
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: