There is growing demand in society for self-organizing collaborative work toward a common goal while preserving a high degree of autonomy of the diverse actors involved. At the same time, existing solutions for facilitating coordination among actors at scale tend to focus on algorithmic control, exercised by a central authority (i.e., platform owner) whose interests and behaviors are not necessarily aligned with the collective. We introduce the notion of decentralized protocol as an alternative to algorithmic control and address the following research question: “How do diverse actors jointly organize themselves toward a common goal without relying on a central authority to scale coordination?” We study OpenStreetMap (OSM), the world’s largest mapping community, which has 10 mln users and produces a high-quality free and editable map of the world, while operating with no formal leadership or user superposition rights. Based on interviews, virtual ethnography, and ethnographic observations of how a variety of tensions are coordinated and resolved in four local OSM communities in Belarus, Belgium, Russia, and Portugal, we identify the key mechanisms of decentralized protocol-based coordination: maintaining collective awareness, establishing collective ownership, and negotiating collective order and contribute a Model of Decentralized Protocol that enables diverse actors to work toward a common goal without having to rely on algorithmic control to organize for coordination at scale.
