Open Social Systems

While normative systems have excelled at addressing issues such as coordination and cooperation, they have left a number of open challenges. The first is how to reconcile individual goals with community goals, without breaching the individual’s privacy. The evolution of norms driven by individuals’ behaviour or argumentation have helped take the individual into consideration. But what about individual norms that one is not willing to share with others? Then there are the ethical considerations that may arise from our interactions, such as, how do we deal with stereotypes, biases, or racism, or how to avoid the abuse of community resources. This paper is concerned with accounting for individual needs while respecting privacy and adhering to the community’s ethical code. We propose a decentralised architecture for normative systems that, along with the community norms, introduces individual’s requirements to help mediate the interaction between members.