The Model of Peopleized Governance in Cyberspace on the Base of Religious Democracy Theory

The main issue of this research is to achieve the desired model of people's participation in cyberspace governance and its main question is as follows: based on the theoretical foundations of religious democracy, what is the ideal model of cyber space governance? In order to find the answer, the required data were collected through interviews with the experts and documentary methods, and analyzed with using Grounded Theory method. The statistical community of experts in this research is a collection of policymakers, executive managers, university professors and researchers related to the field of cyberspace governance in Iran, and a semi-structured interview was conducted with 12 of them using theoretical sampling. The findings collected during 3 stages of open, central and selective coding were analyzed and the validity and reliability of the research process was evaluated and confirmed based on the four criteria of compliance, comprehensibility, generalization and control. The findings of this study show that by considering the differences between cyberspace governance and physical space governance that are emergent of the contextual factors (namely the specific features of this space), the realization of the religious democracy theory in cyberspace governance is possible through a meta-governance. The result of this research is that The Religious and Peopleized Model of Meta-Governance is a combination of three governance models: hierarchical governance model in the infrastructure layer, market governance model in the service layer, and network governance model in the content layer, that surrounded by the principles of the religious democracy theory.