Cybernetic Governance in a Coliving House is a 2024 paper by 📝Daniel Kronovet, Seth Frey of UC Davis, and Joseph DeSimone. It reports an 18-month field experiment in running a nine-bedroom 📝Los Angeles, CA coliving house through digital institutions instead of managers.
The authors draw on Elinor Ostrom's commons theory and describe three mechanisms that form the house's institutional core. The first is a continuous-auction chore scheduler. Each resident owes 100 points a month and earns them by claiming tasks whose point value rises linearly the longer they go undone. The second is a pairwise-preference layer, which lets residents reprioritize tasks asynchronously through quick comparisons. The third is a symbolic "hearts" ledger that tracks norm compliance through automated enforcement, lightweight challenges, and karma awarded by peers.
The authors frame the system as applied cybernetics: humans sense, machines keep the books, and feedback runs in real time, while few people hold privileged roles. Over the study period the house sustained 98% occupancy and below-market rents. The exploratory data cover 567 chore claims, 255 heart events, and 551 group purchases. The authors argue that this tooling can sustain reliable governance of a shared resource without continuous leadership, and offer it as a transferable design palette for online communities, coliving houses, and other digitally mediated collectives. The 19-page paper was posted to SSRN on June 7, 2024 and revised April 23, 2025.
Daniel shared this paper with me.