Future of the trust and reputation systems

What we have done

Personas and scenarios

This week, we have continued to discuss our ideas and what kind of result we wish to create for our presentation. We finally thought of continuing with our initial idea of creating a cross-referencing system, instead of presenting a dark scenario which we also considered.

We talked about creating personas and scenarios with this cross-referencing system, which we have focused on. In order to properly visualize our system, personas and scenarios will be a good aid to understand how it could work and what needs to be developed.

We decided to divide our group where two of us would thoroughly think and prepare a couple of detailed scenarios each and two others would prepare two personas each.

Presentation

The rest of us, the other two, in the group would focus on starting typing the basic texts that can be written at the moment for the book report, like the introduction. As we discussed this, together we agreed on the overall headings and content we wanted to include in the report. For example, we want to discuss the theme for our project idea, about trust, reputation and specifically identity issues, in the beginning of our chapter. Gradually, we want to go into talking about our proposed idea. That way it was clear for the two that will be responsible for the book report this week what they could write so far.

To make sure that we have our meetings set every week, since we have different schedules, we agreed on meeting at least once a week, every Wednesday, starting from next week.

Interview

We spoked to the security manager on Blocket to hear their approach to trust & reputation systems (TR). We became interested in Blocket since they don’t have any TR-system like Amazon or eBay. The results of the interview is to be analyzed further.

We did also have an interview with Dan from eRated who gave us some great insight concerning the possible issues with implementing a trust and reputation system. It is the groups opinion that the interviews we have performed until this state in the project is sufficient to produce a vision of the future both for the final presentation and for the book.

Book Report

We have decided that two people will be responsible for the final text, being responsible they will make sure that we are progressing with the text enough to manage to deliver a quality text when the deadline is due.
These two members have been working on the structure of the report. Inspired by previous reports, we decided which parts will be included in our text and their order. The parts have been divided between the members of the group- according to their contribution to the group work (e.g. someone working with the future scenario will explain that in text).

We have started defining the concepts relevant to our report: identity, reputation and trust. 

What we will do

For next week, we will meet up and discuss our prepared scenarios and personas that will further develop our cross-referencing system and start thinking about the details, the features our system will have that will be advantageous compared to other existing equivalent systems.

We will of course also continue to write on the book report, this time all together. We will collect new relevant references. We already have some gathered from earlier that we thought were interesting. 

Challenges encountered

Even though we have been working with the concepts of reputation and trust for a month now, it is challenging to find definitions in the literature that reflects to what we envision about the future of reputation and identities. 

Changes in the project

Our group is in the moment entering a really inspirational state of the project since it is truly now we can start to mold our ideas into an attempt to fulfill our common vision. In order to make sure that everything will be done on time we have divided responsibilities amongst the group members. We as a group however believe that it is of great importance that every member get a chance to contribute their vision to the final result. In order to achieve this we will make sure that every task is divided into several smaller tasks so that everyone will have a possibility to contribute. We decided to continue with our initial idea about a cross-referencing system, basing the features on the needs of developed personas and their scenarios.