Paolo blog: Ramblings on Web2.0, Trust, Reputation, Recommender Systems, Social Software, Free Software, ICT4D and much more

An insightful essay by Clay Shirky on trust, Web, algorithms, authority. Clay Shirky is able to put in few clear words what I’ve been trying to tell for years.

Khotyn is a small town in Moldova. That is a piece of information about Eastern European geography, and one that could be right or could be wrong. You’ve probably never heard of Khotyn, so you have to decide if you’re going to take my word for it. (The “it” you’d be taking my word for is your belief that Khotyn is a town in Moldova.)
Do you trust me? You don’t have much to go on, and you’d probably fall back on social judgement — do other people vouch for my knowledge of European geography and my likelihood to tell the truth? Some of these social judgments might be informal — do other people seem to trust me? — while others might be formal — do I have certification from an institution that will vouch for my knowledge of Eastern Europe? These groups would in turn have to seem trustworthy for you to accept their judgment of me. (It’s turtles all the way down.)

An authoritative source isn’t just a source you trust; it’s a source you and other members of your reference group trust together.

authority is a social agreement, not a culturally independent fact.

Thanks to the post, I also came to know about “it’s turtles all the way down” (from Wikipedia)

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever”, said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

And you are reading this … because you trust me, I trust Wikipedia, you trust Wikipedia, you trust the fact if I told you that this comes from Wikipedia, you trust this comes from Wikipedia servers, you trust Wikipedia servers don’t change the content of their pages randomly or adhocly, you trust that the link I placed there is a real link to Wikipedia, you trust that what you see on the screen is the result of computers running as they should, you trust that your web browser works the way you think it works in showing you the content from my blog, you trust that the Internet routers long the way did not inserted additional information, …

Elinor Ostrom got the Nobel prize for Economics!
I think I read some of her insights about trust and reciprocity! Check her book “Trust and reciprocity: interdisciplinary lessons from experimental research”!
She is also the first woman to win the Nobel prize in Economics!

From her wikipedia page:
Ostrom is considered one of the leading scholars in the study of common pool resources. In particular, Ostrom’s work emphasizes how humans and ecosystems interact to provide for long run sustainable resource yields. Forests, fisheries, oil fields, grazing lands, and irrigation systems, among others, all exhibit the characteristics of common pool resources and Ostrom’s work has highlighted how humans have created diverse institutional arrangements over natural resources for thousands of years that have prevented ecosystem collapse. Yet, Ostrom is quick to point out that, while successes are abundant, humans are also responsible for countless ecosystem collapses. Her current work emphasizes the multifaceted nature of human-ecosystem interaction and argues against any singular “panacea” attempt to solve individual social-ecological system problems.

By Debra Lauterbach; Hung Truong; Tanuj Shah; Lada A. Adamic
Download as PDF

Abstract: Reputation mechanisms are essential for online transactions, where the parties have little prior experience with one another. This is especially true when transactions result in offline interactions. There are few situations requiring more trust than letting a stranger sleep in your home, or conversely, staying on someone else’s couch. Couchsurfing.com allows individuals to do just this. The global CouchSurfing network displays a high degree of reciprocal interaction and a large strongly connected component of individuals surfing the globe. This high degree of interaction and reciprocity among participants is enabled by a reputation system that allows individuals to vouch for one another. We find that the strength of a friendship tie is most predictive of whether an individual will vouch for another. However, vouches based on weak ties outnumber those between close friends. We discuss these and other factors that could inform a more robust reputation system.

Notes: Can an online social network build enough trust to allow strangers to sleep on each others’ couches?

Transcript of the last part:
“It is how we think.
We don’t know a hundred people. We have 5, 7, 10 close personal friends. Well, we are geeks, so we have 2.
But that’s basically how humans work that we have these people we really trust, it’s family, it’s close friends.
It really fits, you don’t even have to have a mental model, it fits how we are wired up.
So there are huge advantages on this model of networks of trust.”

The advantage to mankind of being able to trust one another, penetrates into every crevice and cranny of human life: the economical is perhaps the smallest part of it, yet even this iS incalculable.

John Stuart Mill - The Principles of Political Economy - 1848

Cool blog post title, eh? ;)

10 practical questions for designing a reputation system. This talk was (partially!) given at the 2008 IA Summit. By Bryce Glass on Slideshare

Designing Social Interfaces - workshop talk given at Web 2.0 Expo

From an old paper of mine, note the message by eBay founder.

In fact, Resnick and Zeckhauser (2002) consider two explanations related to the success of eBay’s feedback system:
(1) “The system may still work, even if it is unreliable or unsound, if its participants think it is working. (…) It is the perception of how the system operates, not the facts, that matters” and
(2) “Even though the system may not work well in the statistical tabulation sense, it may function successfully if it swiftly turns against undesirable sellers (…), and if it imposes costs for a seller to get established.”
They also argue that: “on the other hand, making dissatisfaction more visible might destroy people’s overall faith in eBay as a generally safe marketplace.”

This seems confirmed by a message posted on eBay by its founder in 1996:
“Most people are honest. And they mean well. Some people go out of their way to make things right. I’ve heard great stories about the honesty of people here. But some people are dishonest: or deceptive. This is true here, in the newsgroups, in the classifieds, and right next door. It’s a fact of life. But here, those people can’t hide. We’ll drive them away. Protect others from them. This grand hope depends on your active participation” (Omidyar, 1996).

On eBay, whose goal, after all, is to allow a large number of commercial transactions to happen, it seems that positive feelings and perceptions can create a successful and active community more than a sound Trust Metric and reputation system. This means that the fact that a Trust Metric or reputation system is proved to be attack resistant does not have
an immediate effect on how users perceive it and hence, on how this helps in keeping the community healthy and working.

The book “Computing with Social Trust” is out. In it you can find a chapter by Paolo Avesani and myself about my PhD work on Trust in Recommender Systems. You can download my chapter or buy the dead-tree book from Amazon. Following you can find the Table of contents. Enjoy!

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1st International Conference on Reputation: Theory and Technology – ICORE 2009 aims to become a point of convergence in the multidisciplinary study of reputation.
It will be held in Gargonza Castle, Italy, in the heart of Tuscany, halfway between Siena and Arezzo, March 18-20, 2009

The role of reputation as a social artefact and its practical applications are coming more and more clearly to the attention of the scientific community. The study of reputation and gossip is important in many fields of the social sciences, for example organization science, policy-making, (e-)governance, cultural evolution, social dilemmas, socio-dynamics and sociobiology. Interest in reputation is increasing in philosophy, psychology, social psychology, sociology and cognitive science; formal models appear in game theoretical, mathematical and physics journals; computational reputation systems are among the most studied subjects in multi-agent technology and social simulations.

All this attention is timely, since reputation is an old concept for answering a new challenge, the regulation of complex, global, networked societies. Innovation demands that the potential of old instruments are fully understood and exploited, in order to be incorporated into novel, intelligent technologies.

However, there is a number of ad hoc models, and little integration of instruments for the implementation, management and optimisation of reputation. On the one hand, entrepreneurs and policy makers deem it possible to manage corporate and firm reputation without accessing a solid, general and integrated body of scientific knowledge on the subject. On the other hand, researchers believe they can discuss, design and implement reputation systems without investigating what properties, requirements and dynamics of reputation in natural societies are, and why they evolved.

Reputation deserves a full role as a scientific topic, a focus on its specificities, i.e., its potential as preventive social knowledge and selective mechanism of transmission.
Topics

We invite papers from all scientific communities working on reputation, including multi-agent systems, social simulation, economics, organisation science and management, e-governance/learning/business, virtual societies and markets, social cognition, (evolutionary) game theory, social psychology, sociology, social and collective dilemmas, social dynamics, cultural evolution and business ethics.

Topics for ICORE 2009 include but are not limited to:

* Theory of reputation
* Simulation of reputation
* Computational models of reputation
* Agent reputation models
* Ontologies of reputation
* Logical formalization of reputation
* Experimental evidence of reputation diffusion
* Reputation-based e-government, e-learning, e-business
* Reputation in p2p systems
* Reputation in grid environments
* Reputation for partner selection
* Incentives in Reputation Mechanisms
* Image and reputation
* Reputation management and optimisation
* Reputation and social networks
* Reputation and norms
* Reputation and altruism, reciprocity, and cooperation
* Reputation and trust
* Reputation for sabotage tolerance in large-scale applications
* Reputation and exchange
* Reputation and institutions
* Reputation and social capital
* Corporate and firm reputation

Submission instructions

Electronic submission will be added later to this website.

All submissions should be no longer than 15 pages, in pdf format.
Review criteria

Papers should present novel ideas related to reputation, clearly motivated by problems from current practice or applied research.
We expect claims to be substantiated by theoretical or formal analysis, experimental evaluations, comparative studies, and so on. Authors are also encouraged to submit application papers. Application papers are expected to address an indication of the real world relevance of the problem that is solved, including a description of the deployment domain, and some form of evaluation of performance, usability, or superiority to alternative approaches.
Important dates

* Abstract submission: September 15, 2008
* Paper submission: October 1st, 2008
* Notification: November 10, 2008
* Camera Ready Version of Accepted Papers: December 10, 2008
* Conference: March 18-20, 2009

Sponsors

The conference is organized with the support of the eRep project under the 6th FP of the European Community.

In the future everyone will be famous for 15 persons

(myself on the shoulder of giant Andy Warhol: In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes“)

or

The trust is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed

(myself on the shoulder of William Gibson: The future is already here - it’s just not evenly distributed)

or some quotes from Trust in Peers Trumps the “A-List,” Study Finds by Steve Rubel:

Mediapost reports that a new study from Pollara found that people who engage in social networks and communities put far more trust in friends and family who are online than in popular bloggers, or strangers with 10,000 MySpace “friends.”

Some 58% of opinion elites 35-64 in 18 countries said they trust “a person like me.”

The question of targeting super nodes vs. smaller groups is all coming down to trust. While the marketplace - both marketers and publishers - continue to focus on reach, they are missing the big picture. Trust is by far a more important metric, one that clearly rules when it comes to influence.

The baseline argument is the following.
In the previous era of mass-media, each one of us was “forced” to trust the few of us who had a voice. And this created the Britney Spearses and the Paris Hiltons.
In the current era of easy self web publishing, each of us can choose whom to trust among the many of us who have a voice. And be sure my friend the 15 persons peers I choose to trust are already (and will be even more) different from the 15 persons peers you choose to trust. No more Britnear Spearses in the future, but just your own one.
Simply put, trust is now distributed.

And yes, in case you are wondering, I do believe in the future each of us will stay on the shoulders of dwarves, thousands of dwarves instead of few giants.