Making Decision in Open Communities: Collective Actions in the Public Realm

This special issue is comprised of five articles which explore the modes and forms of decision-making in open communities, i.e. in organizations having loosely coupled, often informal, structures with flexible and permeable boundaries. These communities are emerging in the public realm and performing actions which can be described as a collective. More and more of these organizational environments are perceived to be highly democratic, innovative, and leading to successful social innovations, cohesion processes and governance. The articles represent an attempt to capture the nature of decision environments specific to open communities, and the dynamics of their decisions. The articles discuss characteristics of these communities and how they enable more democratic decisions and, at the same time, identify decision-making constraints that create obstacles for effective collective actions.