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IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2010In both cases, manual or automatic Monitoring, an important concern is to not discriminate any kind ofmembers, avoiding the predisposition to suspect of the newcomers in community, for example by onlymonitoring the events made by the newcomers and not the ones made by the administrators. If a managerabuses of the power conferred to him/her, it configures a norm infraction and has to be submitted to theenforcement process too. In this case, the manager must be seen a malicious member in Figure 2.In some communities the Monitoring can be performed in a subset of events, and not in all events, forexample in LinuxQuestions.org the managers relate the impossibility to review all messages. In order to helpthe Monitoring, self-organizing virtual communities may specify a norm that confers all members the right toreport violations and abuses, so all the members become guards of the community.In open source communities, the code development process has embedded a test phase that is a kind ofMonitoring. During the test phase, the detected malfunctions in general are not consequence of norminfractions. It may occur because only authorized members have access to codes and the process to receivesuch an authorization can be much elaborated. For example, Apache.org uses meritocracy, which means thatthe member has first to be an active contributor, so he/she can be indicated by other member for assuming arole and finally submitted to community voting. Comparing to Wikipedia, where every member can alter thearticles, the possibility of article corruptions can be higher than code corruptions in open source communities.Due to its nature of decision making, the Analysis activity is mainly made by authorized members and notonly by bots. If it is required by the Enforcement Norms, the Analysis activity may also take into account thehistory of the incidents. In Wikipedia, for example, the history of a member is registered in his/her public usertalk page (Geiger and Ribes, 2010). Apache.org uses the called books and records to keep all the accounts andproceedings of the members, so any member has the right to examine its information.In virtual communities the kind of sanction may range from a simple warning to the expulsion of thecommunity. The warning is seen as an educative sanction, considering that transgressor is a member learninghow to work in the community. However, if the transgressor continues to violate the norms repeatedly, hardersanctions can be applied as the access denial to resources, which is implemented using the Access Control ofthe community system.The damages in the community resources can be in majority recovered: messages are removed fromforums, articles are reverted in Wikipedia and codes are fixed in open source communities. However damagescaused to other members, for example offenses, are more difficult to deal with and can require the definition ofcompensations, such as apologies.The proposed enforcement process shows the main enforcement activities in an ordered flux; howeversome feedbacks can occur in the activities execution. For instance, during the execution of the Analysisactivity, some specific information may be needed, so additional data may be required to be collected in theMonitoring activity.In general, the existing self-organizing virtual communities include some sort of enforcement procedures.However, the procedures are not organized and there is no model to place them, so it is not clear how toconsider the procedures and the relations in the context of members, norms, procedures, access control andresources.5. CONCLUSIONAs competition is an active force in communities, conflicts may arise between members or between amember and the whole community. In a self-organizing virtual community conflicts are more likely, becausemembers do not only cooperate to accomplish their work activities, but they cooperate to define and maintainthe norms that regulate the community. Conflicts may result in some norm infractions, when the involvedmembers do not obey the established norms that govern behavior and relations in community. Norminfractions can be also consequence of vandalism. Therefore the enforcement of norms is of relevance to beaddressed.In self-organizing virtual communities, norms have first to be well defined. The community shall alsodefine norms specifically to govern the enforcement, the Enforcement Norms. The Enforcement Norms areimplemented in the system using Access Control and Enforcement Procedures that detail the operationaltasks. So the procedures are performed by members assigned to administrative roles and possibly assisted bytools in the system.133