Hassan Masum and Yi-Cheng Zhang are working on their book, The Reputation Society, with updates provided on their website, ReputationSociety.com, from which we quote below, starting with the questions that inform their work:
How will better matchmaking and collaborative filtering bring you better choices?
Can liars and cheats be made more accountable?
How can the barrage of advertising, spam, events, and interesting ideas be filtered more effectively?
What are effective ways to evaluate products and business partners?
How can higher-quality news media and public discourse be achieved?
Who do you trust? What do you believe?
As they note in their Manifesto for the Reputation Society:
Information overload, challenges of evaluating quality, and the opportunity to benefit from experiences of others have spurred the development of reputation systems. Most Internet sites which mediate between large numbers of people use some form of reputation mechanism: Slashdot, eBay, ePinions, Amazon, and Google all make use of collaborative filtering, recommender systems, or shared judgements of quality.
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But we suggest the potential utility of reputation services is far greater, touching nearly every aspect of society. By leveraging our limited and local human judgement power with collective networked filtering, it is possible to promote an interconnected ecology of socially-beneficial reputation systems – to restrain the baser side of human nature, while unleashing positive social changes and enabling the realization of ever-higher goals.
These issues are explored in the P2P Foundation’s Wiki entry on Reputation – Portability: Â In an age of non-scarcity of content, trust and reputation become more important filtering agents.
A lot of research is being done to devise interoperable reputation systems that could be ported from one system to another, but is that really possible: are reputations portable?
 An excellent discussion on this topic can be found on UnionSquareVentures.com:
If value is shifting to trust then a generalized reputation system could theoretically become the organizing principle behind a large and diverse set of web services. But, Mary Hodder squelched this thread with an important insight about reputations – they are not portable…“you can pull data for reputation from Ebay…. but the thing about the difference between what Tim was talking about, maps, and Ebay’s reputation information is that the mapping data makes sense when you pull it out of the system, whereas the reputation data, because Ebay is so skewed, it’s such a bizarre social environment.
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Microchunking/recombining reputation: “how much value there would be in each person being able to aggregate, authenticate, and use anywhere the elements of their own reputation profile that he/she thinks is best in each particular context. That way, it’s not so much that there would be a ‘system’ for reputation that everyone would try to fit into. Rather, individuals could be free to aggregate and authenticate as much of a broad and deep reputation picture or profile of themselves as they feel would be worthwhile. And, the way we think about it at Opinity, individuals would also be completely welcome to put together multiple reputation profiles of themselves for different contexts, say one for ecommerce, one for professional purposes, one for political or dating or community forum purposes. An eBay rating could be shown in a profile or not as any particular person might deem wise for their purposes. The most important thing is that elements of a reputation profile can be made portable, aggregated, authenticated, and thereby be more useful and worthy of some degree of trust (depending on how broad, deep, and verified the profile is) everywhere on the ‘net.
We obviously need to develop more trustworthy systems of legititmation, authenticity, reputation, and trust itself.
For more discussion on why we need a reputation infrastructure and where it might take us, please read the articles by Masum and Zhang:
- Manifesto for the Reputation Society – reputation systems and their coming impact on society.
- TOOL: The Open Opinion Layer – a vision of an open infrastructure for sharing opinions and reputations.
- Happier World with More Information – mutually beneficial social relations from increased information.
If you are interested in technical details, here are a couple of starting points they recommend:
- Reputations Research Network – people and papers from the research community on reputation systems.
- MIT Reputation Mechanisms Symposium 2003 – wide range of technical papers on the design and behavior of reputation mechanisms.
More information:
Trust in Web Based Social Networks. The Trust Project is an examination of issues related to using trust in web based social networks.
The issue of trust is a very interesting one. I think there ought to be a distinction between the trust we have in people and the confidence we have of technical systems. Both fundamentally have to do with predictability, but trust in people includes agency, or intentional acts; confidence in systems does not (it works by an investment in science, its rationality, and its products).
There’s the matter, too, of whether trust extends beyond first degree relations. If I trust you, do I trust your friends by extension? Clearly it would be a more limited kind of trust. I’m not sure trust is the right word for friends of friends, but adding terms like reputation, affinity, etc. helps. To the extent that software can capture and represent “trust,” it can represent patterns, consistency and interests, the footprints of activity but not intentions themselves.
Thanks for the post!
Good post! The issue of trust is interesting. There’s a distinction I think between trust in people and what I’d prefer to call “confidence” we invest in technical systems. We trust people based on our sense of their intentions and motives. We can trust that a serial killer will hit again. Trusting in a person’s agency, then, has a deep psychological basis (we sometimes trust our sense of a person even more than we trust their words, that’s how deeply our trust is rooted). Confidence in systems, on the other hand, is an investment we make in the scientific rationality behind technololgy, the technology itself, the corporate environment which gives us these products, and so on. These all being relatively easy to rate and capture as reputation etc.
I’m not sure that the trust we have in a person extends to a second degree relation. Insofar as trust involves knowing a person (and I think it does), then the trust we offer to a friend of a friend is a gesture, an extension, and a leap. Social relations exist in part to create and bolster relations where not everybody can know everybody, and where manipulations, lies, and other misrepresentations need to be discouraged by making such behavior too costly.
We can have a very naive view of our social software sometimes; I think what’ll be interesting will be developing reputation, credibility, personality and so on in commercial domains (see Identity 2.0), striking a balance among permission, interests, affinities and social networks, and depth of identity revealed. All these could be tracked, rated, and stored in many different ways, enough to become quite confusing!