A Model of Culture for Software

With the advent of Web 2.0 one can speak about best practices and specific knowledge existing in a community of users of an application. This suggest that there is a kind of “culture” growing around such applications, and this culture is created by the communities. Moreover, cultures of communities “interact” leading to changes in applications, i.e. introducing tabbed browsing in NetCaptor browser in 1998 lead to its appearance in Opera in 2000, Firefox in 2001, and IE in 2006. In this paper we propose a model of culture in communities of Web 2.0 applications and other social software. Such model can be applied for characterization and comparison of culture(s) existing in communities for better understanding the use of systems by people. We provide an operative definition of culture of a community and illustrate by examples how our model of culture can be applied in different contexts in systems for communities in Web 2.0 and in software in general.