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IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2010for technical conferences. In JEMS the profiles of some members (reviewers) are kept in anonymity duringdiscussions, which may contribute to the reduction of personal attacks and offenses.Self-organizing virtual communities are more prone to conflicts, because the cooperation is required bothin the accomplishments of the community activities and in the definition of norms. In both cases, norminfraction may occur as consequence of conflicts, so the community has to resort to the enforcement of normsso that the order can be maintained.Norm infractions may arise during conflicts; nonetheless conflicts are not something that should beavoided in communities. Conflicts are useful because they generate distinct points of view, which can helpmembers to better analyze the topics being discussed. It should be noted that norms infractions are not onlyconsequence of conflicts, they can be caused by either vandalism (when a member intentionally desires tocorrupt community resources) or some misunderstanding during the interpretation of norms.2.2 Concepts related to Norm InfractionSanctions guide the behavior of the members so that norms established by the community are obeyed. Clearand unambiguous norms must be provided in order to reduce misunderstandings. We identify three conceptsrelated to norm infraction: sanction, damage and impact. Figure 1 shows the concepts and some of therelations.A norm infraction causes damages in the community, for example misuse of a page editor makes availablecontents with offenses. Damages have impact, such as the undesirable exposition and loss of members, and thedecrease of community credibility. A sanction, applied to a transgressor, should depend on the impact of thecaused damage, for example a sanction for writing nonsense phrases in content should be less severe than asanction for writing offenses. A sanction may also depend on the history of the transgressor, for instance amember that insists on vandalism has to be punished in a harder way in order to change his/her behavior.Figure 1. Concepts related to a norm infractionThe damages have to be recovered in order to minimize their impacts. In virtual communities based onforums, the damage is recovered by disregarding messages. Examples of damages in forums are: irrelevantmessages (the messages are not related to the community objective), messages that infringe community culture(offenses to members) or that contain commercial information (spam) (Nahon and Neumann, 2005).Priedhorsky et al. (2007) study types of damages in Wikipedia and their impact. Some reported damagesare misinformation (or false information), mass and partial delete (to delete article’s content), offenses (towrite text with obscenities, hate speech, and personal attacks), spam, and nonsense (text that is meaningless tothe readers). Some impacts of the damages are to confuse, offend or mislead readers. Besides, the impacts mayinclude the loss of members and the reduction of articles’ quality. A common technique to recover thedamages is the reversion of the contents to a valid version.Lattemann and Stieglitz (2005) explain that in open source communities the sanctions are not limited to theexclusion of the transgressor and the loss of reputation. Transgressors may be “flamed”, meaning they arepublicly named and judged by other community members. In this kind of community, the damages are mainlyconcerned about misconduct in the developed codes. The authors also comment that the threat of the sanctionsmay help to achieve quality assurance.Flynn (2001) relates the case of an adult-oriented forum that had norms stating that it was forbidden toshare child pornography and to practice spam. The community only recovered the damages caused bytransgressors by removing the inadequate messages. However no sanction was applied to the transgressors, sothere were no means to block them, because the members did not use login and password to access the system.As the number of vandals increased and the community did not find a way to stop them, the forum was closed.This case illustrates the need of sanctions to enforce norms in virtual communities.129