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ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS3. THE ENFORCEMENT OF NORMSIn this section, we extend the model of self-organizing virtual communities with the enforcement of norms.We also propose an enforcement process, detailing its activities and relations.3.1 Enforcement in the Community ModelBezerra and Hirata (2010) propose a model for self-organizing virtual communities. The model is composedby three main elements: Members, Norms and System. The Members belong to the community motivated bytheir personal goals. They define and improve Norms that possibly change how they work by imposingdiscipline. The System, by implementing the norms, provides the means for the members to work, interact, andachieve their goals. The System comprises Resources, Access Control policy model and Procedures.Resources encompasses all the goods developed in the community, such as messages in forums, articles inWikipedia, and documents and codes in open source communities. The permissions over the Resources arehandled by an Access Control policy model. Procedures are driven by the norms and detail the operationalparticipation of the members, for example a procedure to invite a member for the community, and a procedureto revise an article or code.In this article we extend the previous model with elements related to the enforcements of norms as shownin Figure 2. The norms and procedures related to the cooperation of members to develop their Resources arenow called, respectively, Work Norms and Work Procedures. There can be distinct kind of Work Norms, forexample in Wikipedia they are mainly divided in content-related and behavior-related norms (Geiger andRibes, 2010). The way that the enforcement is performed has to be also established using additional norms wecall Enforcement Norms. The Enforcement Norms regulate how the community detects violations in normsand deals with the concepts of sanctions and damages. Besides, the Enforcement Norms have associatedprocedures called Enforcement Procedures.Figure 2. Self-organizing virtual community model with enforcement of normsThe extended model also includes a new relation called “references” between system and norms, becauseduring the enforcement activities, the Enforcement Norms may be referenced to. Another consideration is thatthe Access Control can be seen as the primary mean of enforcement, because it assigns permissions tomembers manipulate resources according to the rights and duties established by norms.The model shown in Figure 2 divides the members into two classes: non-malicious members and maliciousmembers. In the former model proposed by Bezerra and Hirata (2010), all the members are considered nonmalicious.The non-malicious members use the system correctly obeying the defined norms. The maliciousmembers misuse the system by infracting the established norms. As a consequence of the malicious behavior,the mechanisms to enforce norms may make use of the system to restrict the transgressor activities.In order to know what the Enforcement Norms and Procedures should address, the next section identifiessome activities related to the enforcement of norms. In this article, the term activity is used to indicate an130