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IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2010ENFORCEMENT OF NORMS IN SELF-ORGANIZINGVIRTUAL COMMUNITIESJuliana de Melo Bezerra and Celso Massaki HirataComputer Science Department, ITAS.J.Campos, BrazilABSTRACTIn virtual communities, norms are established in order to discipline and organize their members. The community is calledself-organizing virtual community when members are responsible to define and update the norms. Cooperation isrequired both in the execution of the community activities and in the definition of norms. As consequence of cooperation,conflicts may arise, and as consequence of conflicts, norm infractions may occur. Norm infractions can be alsoconsequence of vandalism and misunderstanding of norms. Dealing with norm infractions is essential to keep the order inthe community. An effective way to deal with norm infractions is provide approaches of enforcement of norms. Thisarticle presents an extension of self-organizing virtual community model and a process for enforcing the norms. Themodel considers malicious members, enforcement norms, and enforcement procedures. The process takes into accountnorm infractions detection and analysis, sanctions, and damages. The proposed model can be used as a guideline fordesigning and constructing self-organizing virtual communities.KEYWORDSSelf-organizing, virtual community, enforcement, norm, sanction, damage.1. INTRODUCTIONA community is an association of people, called members who are oriented by individual motivations andcooperate in order to achieve a common objective (Lenhard, 1988). When the relationship among membersand the cooperation itself takes place over the Internet, the community is known as virtual community(Rheingold, 1998). The term virtual is applied because the members are not in contact personally, but they areconnected through the Internet.Norms are established in order to discipline and organize the members in communities. A norm is a type ofprinciple or rule that states obligation, permission, power attribution or competence attribution (Palaia, 2005)(Lyons, 1984). As members’ interests and demands change over time, virtual communities are not fixed andconsequently norms evolve. Virtual communities that promote their own evolution are called self-organizingvirtual communities because they create, increment and adapt the norms that govern their relations andprocesses. The self-organization stimulates the participation and involvement of members, contributing to thepersistence of the community over time (Moe et al., 2008).Examples of self-organizing virtual communities are LinuxQuestions.org (Lattemann, 2005), Wikipedia(Goldspink et al., 2008) (Beschastnikh et al., 2008), NetBeans.org (Jensen and Scacchi, 2005) and Apache.org(Lattemann, 2005). In these communities members can change the norms by participating on theirenhancements. According to the above definition, virtual communities as Linkedin and Orkut are not selforganizingones, because norms are established by a board (that maintain the community) and not bymembers.The norms definition is essential for the community organization and the enforcement of such norms shallbe also addressed. As explained by Palaia (2005), a norm shall contain a coercion element in order to force themembers to follow it: if a member disregards a norm, he/she suffers a sanction effect, which is a punishmentfor the violation. It is important to mention that a sanction is not always a punishment. The punishment is anegative sanction. There can be also positive sanctions, as rewards (Palaia, 2005). The positive sanctions areuseful to instigate the effort of members in some direction, for example a reputation scheme to congratulate127