Group: Trust and reputation systems

Week: 44

Since the start of the project work we as a group have been focusing a lot on which direction we are supposed to take in the broad subject of trust and reputation systems. We soon realised that the concept of an individual’s online identity/ies seems to be central. We started out brainstorming the area in it’s entirety and especially trying to understand and evaluate how existing trust and reputation systems work.The brainstorming session ended with the group members voting on their preferences. The two main areas of interest in regards to our project were (a) proposing a future which we want or don’t want, and (b) a product that could solve problems of tomorrow. We have been focusing on reading up on the field of online identities, trust and reputation systems.

The project leader has been in touch with the project leader of the other group working with future of trust to make sure that our ideas and projects do not collide.

Additionally we have been researching in order to find appropriate people from the field to interview. So, we have contacted some people trying to set up interviews in the following weeks. We have also decided on the people we want to contact in the future and some that we are considering to ask for advice, guidance or even interviews. At the moment we have booked an skype interview with Dan Benjamin (CEO) from eRated which is one of the services we found when creating the projectplan.

Going back to the future scenario, we decided that we should use personas as a starting point so that we can define the problems and the future scenario in a better way.

Last but not least, we discussed that existing reputation systems -in some platforms and networking sites, e.g. Airbnb- seem to work really well. People trust each others’ reviews and comments, thus enabling trust between strangers and collaboration in the digital commons and the sharing economy. Individuals in online communities are good at self-regulating, finding ways to punish free riders and rule breakers, and thus protecting the integrity of the systems.

As for the future we are planning to work on personas and scenarios to try to analyze the problems of today in order to create solutions for the problems of tomorrow. The task for the following week will be defining main issues and areas that we consider important. After that we will create and develop personas.

As previously mentioned, we have also planned to contact people to schedule interviews. In the next 2 weeks we are also going to contact some of the guests lecturers which we consider relevant to our field and try to set a date and time for an interview.

Regarding literature, we plan to start looking for information for the social capital, while we will continue our research on the reputational capital, trust, online identities etc.

During the following week we will focus on preparing our presentation for the mid-crit. Since our theme is pretty wide, we need to be well prepared as a group so that we can receive constructive feedback and make the appropriate decisions necessary for the future of our project.

The challenges we as a group are facing right now is to narrow down the broad and interlinked subjects of trust, reputation systems and online identities. We do need to narrow the project down to a smaller idea which is what we hope to achieve using the scenarios and personas in the next coming week. Besides that the group is working really well together and it seems that every member of the group does feel that he/she is contributing to the project as a whole. We believe that have a very solid structure on our documents and well aware of how to handle the internal communication.

Since this is the first progress report not much have changed considering the direction of the project. It should be mentioned that on our guidance meeting we were inspired by the aspect of a darker future scenario; of maybe not trying to create a future product in order to solve the problems of tomorrow, but to actually try to predict the future, either good or bad, as a consequence of the the future reputation system. We will thus build upon existing systems, working with limitations that they may have. This has lead to discussions concerning the future of surveillance and the collecting of data that is going on in our society today. The field in itself is, as we said before, huge and filled with possibilities. Below we have a image of sort of a timeline which we draw in order to approach the different possible directions of the project.



Timeline for the direction of the project

Resources

Books:

Botsman, R. and Roo, R. (2010). "What is mine is yours: How collaborative consumption is changing the way we live".

Rainie, H., Wellman, B. (2012). “Networked: The New Social Operating System”. United States: Mit Press.

chapter 9 : “Networked Information”

chapter 11 : “The Future of Networked Individualism”


Articles:

Beckenkamp, M. (2013). "Institutions and Trust in Commons: Dealing with Social Dilemmas" in The Wealth of the Commons, A World Beyond Market & State [online]. Available at: <http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/institutions-and-trust-commons-dealing-social-dilemmas>, [Assessed on 2014-09-10].

Kietzmann.J. et al (2011). “Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media”, Business Horizons, 54, 241—251.

Websites (besides the ones mentioned in the Project plan 1.0) and platforms for reputation systems:

eRated (2014). eRated [online]. Available at: <http://www.erated.co/>, [Assessed on 2014-10-27].


DandyID (2014). DandyID [online]. Available at: <http://www.dandyid.org/beta/start>, [Assessed on 2014-10-27].


Social Mention (2014). Social Mention [online]. Available at: <http://www.socialmention.com/>, [Assessed on 2014-10-27].