About CommonsForge

CommonsForge teaches the mechanics of governance the way a social scientist meets them: by designing the rules of a community and watching them work — or break. You give a village hidden appetites, set a quota, enforcement, penalties and a stewardship reward, run a seeded season, and watch the shared resource sustain or collapse. It is a mechanism-design-and-simulation lab for ages 15–18 (the tragedy of the commons, Ostrom’s design principles, Goodhart’s law, and agent-based modelling).

The cast (a text-forward case, no illustrations)

CommonsForge is an older-teen app, so its story is delivered as realistic case personas — no cartoon cast, no chapters (that is deliberate for this band).

Ada, the community-rules designer — embodies mechanism design: rules are not wishes, they are incentives. She asks “given how people actually behave, what does this rule make them do?”
Boaz, the moderation-appeals reviewer — embodies the trade-off and the guard against Goodhart: every metric can be gamed and every sanction can be unjust. He asks “what are we really trying to protect, and who does this rule cost?”

The motivating case

Every online platform faces the same fight: a shared space (a forum, a game’s matchmaking, a wiki) that is worth using only while most people don’t abuse it. Reputation systems, karma, penalties, appeals and matchmaking filters are all attempts to govern that commons. CommonsForge lets a teen sit in the designer’s chair — and discover why the naïve fixes (reward raw activity; punish everyone; trust everyone) fail, and what actually holds.

What it does NOT do

No AI near the model. Every number is a deterministic, seeded computation you can reproduce — never a guess from a model.
No claim that a karma/reputation number measures worth. It measures how a model of behaviour responds to rules; that is all.
No accounts, no data leaves your device. The whole community runs in your browser; the only thing stored locally is how many seasons you have run.
No leaderboards, streaks, or pressure. The lab is calm — design the rules, run a season, change a lever, run again.

Honest yield

CommonsForge is practice with real social-science ideas — incentives, collective action, and the limits of any single metric — presented through the platform-governance problems teens live inside. It is not a claim that using it raises test scores, makes anyone “smarter”, or changes how they behave online.

Part of the Spark & Anvil portfolio · Program #113 (Board-Game Platform & Together). Web-pioneered — the iOS app is a separate, founder-gated build.