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ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISmembers that make relevant contributions to the community. In order to ease the understanding of the text, weuse the term sanction as a synonym of punishment.The enforcement of norms in self-organizing virtual communities has attracted interest. Nahon andNeumann (2005) study how virtual communities that share messages, specifically forums, regulate themselves.They explain that some members called managers are responsible to detect and disregard messages thatinfringe norms. Geiger and Ribes (2010) relate a case of banning a vandal in Wikipedia. They explain howsome members, the vandal fighters, work assisted by tools called bots (Geiger, 2009) in order to keep thecommunity harmonious by enforcing the norms. The article gives an overview about how Wikipedia enforcesits norms by combining people and bots. Forte and Bruckman (2008) identify in Wikipedia the designprinciples for self-organizing communities studied by Ostrom (2000) for physical communities that managenatural resources. The principles include concepts of monitoring, sanction, and enforcement. Other articlesFlynn (2001), Moe et al. (2008), and Lattemann and Stieglitz (2005) report on how the enforcement of normsis used in some specific communities. However the articles do not provide a general model for theenforcement of norms in self-organizing virtual communities.The enforcement of norms helps to assure that the norms are obeyed by members, contributing to keep theorder in the community. Keeping the order, members cooperate harmoniously and they are more confident onthe community ability to handle undesired situations. Therefore, community credibility and members’motivation increase. In this article, we propose an extended model of self-organizing virtual communitiesaddressing the enforcement of norms with specific norms and procedures. In order to accomplish theenforcement, we also propose an enforcement process taking into account norm infractions, sanctions anddamages.In Section 2 we discuss some aspects that lead to the existence of norm infractions and we address theconcepts related to a norm infraction. In Section 3, we propose the extended model to deal with enforcement invirtual communities. We identify the enforcement process and then we include it in the model of selforganizingvirtual communities. Section 4 provides some discussions with respect to the model. The lastsection concludes our work.2. NORM INFRACTIONS AND RELATED CONCEPTSIn this section, we discuss the cooperation and competition forces in communities and norm infractions.Besides we describe some concepts associated to a norm infraction.2.1 Norm InfractionsIn all communities, physical or virtual, there are forces that join and dissipate members. A force is calledcooperation, when members work together aiming a common objective. In virtual communities cooperation isaided by tools of computer supported cooperative work. In order to organize the cooperation, members areassigned to roles that define permissions on activities that they are allowed to perform (Lenhard, 1988). So theoperational norms are established in the community.Cooperation is a motivation for the existence of a community; however it is not the unique force in thecommunity. There is the competition motivated by opposite views between members. A competition is not justfor obtaining a scarce good or the best of the goods, but it may happen to conquer power, fame, status andpartners (Ogburg and Nimkoff, 1972).Competition sometimes contributes to incentive members in their activities. However, when competitionamplifies and the objective of a member becomes to win the other, a conflict arises (Lenhard, 1988). Norminfractions can appear during a conflict, because the opponents are involved in the dispute and may ignore theestablished norms that govern behaviors and relations. In this case, norm infractions are related to insult andpersonal attacks. In some virtual communities the possibility of occurrence of conflicts is reduced by the lackof cooperation, for example in communities whose objective is the social networking, such as Orkut andLinkedin. In this kind of community, a member maintains his goods and shares them only with desiredmembers. Members do not develop an activity together, so cooperation is almost inexistent as well as conflict.Other virtual communities can reduce conflicts even with the presence of active cooperation. It is the caseof JEMS (Journal and Event Management System), a community of researchers that submit and review papers128