The norm nobody could enforce

Why it is hard to see

Because until it is tested, an unenforceable norm and a working one look exactly the same.

Everybody observes it. Nobody has ever had to be asked. The community describes itself by it to visitors, puts it on the website, and selects for it informally at every stage of membership — so for years the absence of any process is invisible, because the process has never been needed.

Then somebody joins who agreed to it sincerely and later changed, or who read it as an aspiration rather than a requirement, or who simply decided differently. And the group discovers that the thing at the centre of its identity exists nowhere in its agreements.

What follows is worse than the original breach. Some members experience it as a betrayal of the community’s purpose. Others, reading the agreements, find nothing that was broken and conclude the first group is trying to impose a preference. Both are right, which is what makes it unresolvable: the community is now arguing about whether it ever had a rule, in front of a live case, about a specific neighbour.

What to check

Take the three things the community says it stands for, and find each one in the agreements. Not the vision statement — the part that says what follows if somebody does not observe it. Most groups find one of three, and are surprised by which.

Ask the hypothetical before you need it. What would happen if a member simply stopped doing this? Ask it about something nobody is currently doing, so it is a question about structure rather than about a person. The answers will vary wildly, which is the finding.

Check whether it is a condition of membership or a shared habit. Both are legitimate. A community can hold a strong culture without making it a rule — but it should know which it has chosen, because the two behave completely differently the first time somebody diverges.

If it is already happening

Separate the live case from the general rule, and resolve them in that order. The instinct is to write the policy now, and the policy will be about this person, and everyone will know.

Say out loud that there was no process. Communities try to avoid this admission, and the avoidance costs far more than the admission would: members watching a rule apparently materialise lose confidence in every other rule. “We have no process for this, we are going to make one for this case, transparently, and review it afterwards” is a legitimate and repairable position.

Then decide the harder question honestly: is this a condition of membership, or a strong preference the community holds? If it is a condition, it needs a process, and it needs to be visible to anyone joining. If it is a preference, the group has to accept that members may diverge — and say so, which is often the real conversation nobody wanted to have.

What prevents it

Identity constraints written as testable statements with a process attached rather than as values. The test: could somebody who did not share the value tell, from the agreements, exactly what was required of them, and what would happen if they declined?

Sources & further reading

1. 1 RCOS stress test — Cultural Norm Violation Scope Test — the specification this page puts into plain language
2. 2 RCOS Core — Layer 0: Identity & Scope — identity constraints must be testable, and must not be enforced informally
3. 3 How this is written — how we use what we learn from communities we work with, and what we never publish

Written by EcoHubs members, with AI assistance for drafting and editing, and reviewed by a person before publication. Facts are checked against the sources listed; anything we could not verify is marked. How this is written