Formalizing the evolution of virtual communities

Collaboration increasingly takes place in virtual communities using the Internet. These communities are socio-technical systems that tend to evolve strongly and become more complex over time. To ensure that the changes to these complex socio-technical systems are meaningful and acceptable to the community as a whole, the relevant members of the community need to be involved in their specification. The RENISYS method conceptualizes community specification processes as conversations for specification by relevant members. It supports this process in two steps. First, it uses formal composition norms to select the relevant community members who need to be involved in a particular conversation for specification. It then uses a formal model of conversations for specification to determine the acceptable conversational moves that the selected community members can make, as well as the status of their responsibilities and accomplishments at each point in time. By combining composition norms with conversations for specification, the specification processes can be precisely tailored to the specification support needs of the community.