Friday, November 14, 2014

The Future of Trust & Reputation systems w.46

Future scenario

Taking into consideration of the feedback from MidCrit, during this week we focused on choosing a direction of the future of our project plan. We decided to stick to our original with the cross-referencing system, where an individual’s information and reputation from both the online and the offline world will be collected in one place. Taking the existing systems one step further, from future trends and from our discussions both within the group and with the interviewees, we assume that in the future there will be more that one services working with data collection and providing services about individuals’ identities and reputation. Collecting someone’s reputation in one place will enable trust in the future.
Our system, Identity Bank is a company in this market. It needs to be noted that control over the flow of information lies within the individual, and that personalised ratings will suggest the best possible matches for the user, e.g. from suitable jobs to appropriate restaurants. We believe that such a system will make the life easier-at least for some people. But what is interesting for us is the dystopian aspect of the future. By presenting aspects such as the surveillance society, individuals being forced to share things online, individuals being locked out of this system, digital ghosts- described by Rachel Botsman as people that either don’t participate in collaborative economies or opt-out of reputation sharing- the digital divide, we want to alarm people on the dangers of the future.

We will present our project using a commercial for the future cross-referense system as a way to envision the future of trust & reputation systems.


Interviews


Last week we arranged an interview with Jan Ainali, CEO of Wikimedia Sweden. The interview took place on Tuesday 11th November, so the previous days we were working on the agenda and the questions of the interview. Among others we discussed with Jan on the the future of identities and how they will be a combination of our online and offline identities. Even though he considers that our future scenario will probably take place, Jan admitted that Wikipedia would probably be conservative in integrating a cross-referencing system like the one we envision. We also discussed the upcoming problem of individuals not participating in the online world and that due to the digital divide, which might be greater in the future, some people will be left behind. Jan noted that digital identity should not be seen as neither a dystopia nor as a utopia. According to him it depends on how we use a system and the important thing is to find a balance between the advantages and the disadvantages.

We are still trying to book a Skype interview with Dan Benjamin (CEO) from eRated, which is one of the services we analysed when trying to design the future cross-referencing system. At the moment we will probably have an interview with him next week either at tuesday or thursday via skype.

Additionally, we got a response from the CEO of ProveTrust, which is also one of the reputation services that we analysed when designing the future cross-referencing system. First of all, he explained that they believe that trust can be quantified, and that there can be different components of trust. Therefore, what their service is trying to provide additional sub-scores that explain many aspects of a user. Peter also noted that trends are showing that the offline and online worlds are converging, but that does not necessarily mean that anonymity cannot be supported in the future. About individuals not participating in certain services in the future, Peter wrote that not having enough information about someone and not being able to have access to his/her reputation does not imply that they are not trustworthy. The way he sees it “Their trustworthiness is unknown, but not necessarily bad.”

Last but not least, we are in touch with Blocket to find out how trust works in their service. The way we understand it there is not a special system to check the reputation of the seller. We are now waiting for their response.

Brainstorming: The Identity Bank
















What we will do:

  • Next week we will work on the development of our project. Some members of our group will develop personas and specify the scenarios we want to present to show how our service will be used and how the future of identities and reputation will look like. The rest of the group will start working on the book report. 
  • We will present our project using a commercial for the future cross-referense system. 
  • We will attempt creating an animated commercial to present the future “trust & Rep” system. 
  • We will try to book the skype interview with the CEO of Erated.

Challenges encountered:

It is difficult and time consuming to book interviews and to get responses from the people that we contact. As a group we are now faced with a crossroad where we need to agree upon the direction of the project. So this week we chose to put a lot of emphasis on agreeing upon a common goal and a direction that we all agree with. Since we have focused a lot on information gathering since the beginning of the project we are now supposed to use it in order to progress towards the final result of the project. There was truly a challenge to take a direction since the future of trust & reputation systems provides us with a lot of interesting possibilities in how to approach the subject. To agree upon the goal and to keep that direction is the challenge we continuosly faced and will face in the project.

1 comment:

  1. I think you seem to be doing very well. It is good that you also spend time on agreeing on the common goal and how to get there. At the same time, you seem to be aware that you should not spend too much time doing that, but also getting things done when it comes to interviews and the production of texts et cetera. It seems to me that you are on the right track. Keep up the good work!

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