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This is very cool! Thank you for experimenting with grants in this format
You may find inspiration in papers like Modular Politics, which spawned Metagov, an online research community I'm a part of attempting to experiment with and understand digital governance. Although their focus is largely online platforms, there are a number of scholars adjacent to the community who study non-digital governance. (Related is the excellent 80,000 hours interview with Audrey Tang where she talks about Taiwan's governance experiments with Polis.)
The best older/non-digital literature I know of is from Elinor Ostrom — Governing the Commons is particularly good and provides a meta-ethnography of different long-lasting governance structures (ranging from villages in Yamanashi prefecture deciding how to harvest grain to Zanjera irrigation communities in the Phillipines). David Levi-Faur points out in the Oxford Handbook of Governance that 'governance' (the systematic study of how people can/should make rules for each other) is somewhat recent (~1980s), and as far as I can tell, there isn't a deep governance literature that's comparable to, say, game theory. The work of social/political anthropologists like E.E. Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes, who used case studies of the Nuer people in Ethiopia may also be a next good bet.
I think governance is very important, and have tried to collect the most important questions in the space, which has involved a very brief and broad literature review. I've also been collecting digital constitutions and documenting the processes that spawned them. I consider the topic of governance both very rich and highly underexplored.