Effective Communication in Virtual Adversarial Collaborative Communities

Effective communication helps communities to achieve common goals, but is especially hard to achieve in virtual adversarial collaborative communities. In these communities, the matching of widely differing objectives as well as interests is very complex. We study a case of a virtual adversarial collaborative community in which the common goal was to author reports assessing the amount of true consensus on forestry policies. We use discourse ethics theory to derive communication norms that are a prerequisite for making communication in adversarial collaborative communities more effective. We discuss how these norms can be used in the design of the communication systems supporting such communities.