Empowering Users in Online Open Communities

In this paper, we propose an architecture supporting online open communities, where by open communities, we mean communities where previously unknown people can join, possibly for a limited amount of time. The fundamental question that we address is “how we can make sure that an individual’s requirements are taken into consideration by the community while her privacy is respected and the community’s ethical code is not violated”. The main contributions are: (i) a conceptual framework which allows to describe individual and community profiles, including data and norms that provide information about their owner and their requirements, and (ii) a decentralised architecture enabling interactions that leverage the exchange of profile information among people and communities to ensure that requirements are fulfilled and privacy is respected.