COOPERATION AND

CONFLICT IN
COMPUTER
COMMUNITIES

Presenters:
Erika Marcos
Beatrice Anastacio
 MANAGING THE
VIRTUAL COMMONS:
COOPERATION AND
CONFLICT IN
COMPUTER
COMMUNITIES

By Peter Kollock and Marc Smith

OVERVIEW

1. The problem of cooperation

2. The Usenet
3. Social Dilemmas in Cyberspace
4. Managing The Virtual Commons
4.1. Group size and boundaries
4.2. Rules and institutions
4.3. Monitoring and sanctioning
5. Conclusions
THE PROBLEM OF
COOPERATION

• The root of the problem of cooperation is the fact that there is often a tension between
individual and collective rationality.
• Social dilemmas and underlie many of the most serious social problem we face
• "Tragedy of Common" ( Hardin 1968)
• The challenge of providing public goods.
THE USENET
• Developed in 1981 as an alternative to service available through the ARPANET (Advance Research Projects Agency
Network)
• Usenet has grown exponentially and currently consist of several thousand discussion group called NEWSGROUP.
• The topics of newsgroups are displayed in the name of the group and are design to advertise the focus of the group.
THE USENET

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SIGNATURES
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SOCIAL DILEMMAS IN CYBERSPACE
✿ On the Usenet, the key common resource is not an open
pasture, but bandwidth .
Among the actions that are usually considered an
inappropriate use of Bandwidth are:
1. Posting extremely long articles
2. Reproducing long sections of text from a previous post
rather than summarizing or excepting only the relevant
passages, including long signatures full off comments and
diagrams at the end of a post
3. Posting the same message to many newsgroups instead o
one or a small, well-chosen set.
★ Temptation of free-ride:
1. Asking questions but not answering them
2. Gathering information but not distributing it
3. Or reading on going discussions without contributing to
them (Lurking).
♥ Being of-topic threatens the coordination of discussion that
being Usenet rests on.
♥ Users who do post to many newsgroups without the regard
to the topic are said to be GRANDSTANDING
♠ Violating the decorum
 MANAGI NG THE
01 Group boundaries are clearly
defined VI RTUAL
COMMONS

02
Rules governing the use of collective
goods are well matched to local
needs and conditions
05
A system for monitoring member's
behavior exists; this monitoring is
undertaken by the community
members themselves

03 06
Most individuals affected by these
rules can participate in modifying the A graduated system of sanctions is
rules used

04 07
The rights of community members to
devise their own rules is respected
by external authorities
Community members have access to
low- cost conflict resolution
mechanisms
 GROUP SI ZE
AND
BOUNDERIES
The larger the group, the less it pursues its common
interest due to the cost of an individual's decision to free
ride, anonymity, and difficulty of communicating with others
and coordinating activities. Design principles such as having
clearly defined boundaries are essential for successful
communities. Boundaries are essential for promoting regular
communication among group members, but they are often
undefendable and ill-defined. Akela and community kill files
are tools to create customized personal boundaries on
Usenet, but have practical problems.
Rules & Institutions
Managing the Virtual Commons
Any successful community will have a set of rules – whether implicit
or explicit – that governs how common resources should be used
and who is responsible for producing and maintaining collective
goods. As Ostrom states that there is a good match between the
goals and local conditions of a group,

and the rules that govern the actions of the group’s members. Her
research indicates that there is a great variation from community to
community in the details of the rules for managing collective goods. It is
very critical to take a specific rules of a successful group and apply them
blindly to other groups. Ostrom also found out that an additional
characteristic of successful communities is that most of the individuals
affected by the rules…
governing the use of common resource can participate in
modifying those rules. These feature results in better-
designed rules because the individuals with the
knowledge of the day-to-day workings of the group and
the challenges the group faces could modify the rules over
time to better fit the local conditions.

Rules that were created and forced upon a community by

outside authorities often failed miserably because the rules
did not take into account the knowledge of local conditions.
A well-crafted set of rules for managing collective resource
is certainly important for newsgroups, and some progress
has been made in defining those rules. Rules and
institutions exist in on a global and local level throughout
the USENET.

Globally, a set of documents exist which chart out rules that

should govern participation. Six key documents have been
grouped together in what is described as “mandatory course”
for new users. These documents discuss rules of etiquette,
suggestions for using the USENET efficiently, cautions against
wasting bandwidth or being off-topic, and many other issues.
On the local level, and consistent with the principle that
rules should be tailored to local conditions, many
newsgroups have also established a body of information
about the newsgroup, complete with prescriptions and
prescriptions, that is how as a Frequently-Asked Questions
file or FAQ.

However, there are problems: not every newsgroup has a FAQ

(indeed, the creation of a FAQ is often the first sign that a group
has resolved some of the hurdles of collective organization);
some FAQs do not address critical issues or do so ambiguously;
some newsgroups do not have a clear sense of their goals or the
challenges.
Issues of FAQs:

• New members do not bother on reading them

and other related documents
• These documents do not contain specific
recommendations for dealing with their
violations

All enforcement on the USENET remains an

informal process.
The production of FAQ helps in creating and modifying
rules based on the every-day events within the newsgroup.
But in the creation and modification of rules, not everyone
is required to participate. It could be group of people and
even only one can do it.

The thing is that even newsgroups that have produced a FAQ,

their rules and institutions remain informal, undocumented and
difficult to implement. Hence, certain serious issues of the
newsgroup will not be addressed and resolved.
The rules that govern a virtual community plays a
significant role in maintaining the proper and systematical
function of the group. It is also important that new and old
members know these rules and information necessary to
carry interaction in a newsgroup.

But long-time members ignore questions from neophytes

(termed newbies) and not contribute to the creation or
maintenance of FAQ files. New members are tempted to wade
into a newsgroup without learning the information and details
which are prepared by other members.
For instance, a group of member post an off-topic
discussion are not addressed properly and consistently. This
leads to the creation of set authorities that evaluates the
topics that they want to post and these authorities have
the right to allow them to post it on public or not.

Finally, the USENET is not subject to much interference from

external authorities. This is an advantage since it will allow the
newsgroups to hone and modify their rules based on the
required approach in the community.
Monitoring and Sanctioning
Managing the Virtual Commons
Monitoring and sanction is not merely for punishing rule
breakers but also for assuring the members that informal
behaviors of other members are not being tolerated. This
also makes the community successful in a way that the
rules are being properly implemented and addressed
carefully.

Interaction in USENET makes monitoring much easier, it is also

possible to monitor others thoroughly because if someone
violates the rules in a certain newsgroup everybody can see their
email address.
Being off-topic is highly inconsiderable because it will make
the newsgroup uncoordinated. Newsgroups are typically
strict in terms of its rules. If a member of a certain
newsgroup is being rude, insensitive, or insulting someone
other members may report their unlawful actions.

“Free-riders” – the term used for users who are doing actions
that do not conform with the law. Proper decorum is very
important in newsgroups.
Participants use informal sanctions to try to shape
behavior. For instance, free-riders might be insulted,
parodied, or simply informed that actions are undesirable.
However, there is no perfectly designed rules in
newsgroups and ambiguity is always present in applying a
particular rule. Since rules and regulation in newsgroups
remains informal, the responses to the inappropriate
actions toward those users who are violating the rules are
still happens very often.

Formal method for dealing with conflicts in newsgroups is yet to

be developed. There is no USENET court system and such.
USENET relies on the principle that most conflicts die out after a
period of time.
 CONCLUSIONS
• Systems like the Usenet are continuously changing, their present form has implications for the future nature of society increasingly
woven together by these technologies

• "Computers are being used, in effect, to manage networks of relationships between people" (Applegate 1993:A9), thus changing the
costs and benefits of cooperation

• Cooperation is an accomplishment, and on the Usenet, cooperation must occur w/o recourse to external authorities

• Yet, for all the cooperation, there remain significant shortcomings. Many newsgroups remain relatively uncooperative places, filled
with noise and argument

• This double edge makes it imperative that we deepen our knowledge of the ways in which computer-mediated communications alters
the economies of cooperation,

Source:
(PDF) Managing the Virtual Commons: Cooperation and Conflict in Computer Communities (researchg
ate.net)
THANK YOU

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