Towards a theory of online social rights

Abstract

Legitimacy, defined as fairness plus public good, is a proposed necessary online and physical community requirement. As Fukuyama notes, legitimate societies tend to prosper, while others ignore legitimacy at their peril. Online communities are social-technical systems (STS), built upon social requirements as well as technical ones like bandwidth. As technical problems are increasingly solved, social problems like spam rise in relevance. If software can do almost anything in Cyberspace, there is still the challenge of what should it do? Guidelines are needed, We suggest that online communities could decide information rights as communities decide physical action rights, by a legitimacy analysis. This requires a framework to specify social rights in information terms. To bridge the social-technical gap, between what communities want and technology does, rights must be translated into information terms. Our framework has four elements: information actors (people, groups, agents), information objects (persona, containers, items, comments, mail, votes), information methods (create, delete, edit, view, move, display, transfer and delegate), and the information context. The conclusions apply to any social-technical community, and we apply the framework to the case of Wikipedia. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.