Marco Bani and Stefano De Paoli
online technologies. In online relations, it is quite common to interact with unknown people. This is the reason why in serious and well‐established online services, these decisions( from e‐commerce to health and government services) are often supported by trust and reputation systems.
Reputation is the summary of a person ' s relevant past actions in the context of a specific community. It is a collective value of trust that a community awards to a person. The definition points to two key aspects: the communitarian value of reputation and the temporal frame( reputation is awarded on past actions). People prefer to interact with reputable persons, because their trustworthiness has been assessed by their peers( Dasgupta 1988).
To a certain extent this is also true for online interactions. The problem, however, is that differently from faceto‐face interaction, online interactions are dis‐embedded from any specific social context. It is indeed quite different to buy a book on Amazon from an unknown seller or from the book store located in the neighborhood where you live. In the second case you can see and touch what you are buying and you can interact directly with the seller. In the first case you are just interacting with the portal interface and you need to place a terrific deal of trust in the seller and the product you are purchasing as they are described on such interface. Online Reputation Systems have been identified a solution: these are systems that collect, maintain and display ratings, votes, comments and reputations more generally on several aspects of the online behaviour of users. Reputation systems in brief try to digitize societal reputational processes and mechanisms( Dellarocas 2010) fostering social order and structure in web communities( Glass and Farmer 2010).
4. Social media as tools for reputation assessment
The need for online reputation in digital civics stems primarily from the flourishing of peer‐to‐peer( p2p) services that allow resource sharing directly among users, creating what is called " sharing economy "( Botsman and Rogers 2010). The need to judge the veracity and accuracy of a given user with whom we would like to start a transaction is paramount for the stability of online relations. However, nowadays we are facing a proliferation of reputation system: each web service can have, and indeed often has, its own reputation system, which is not comparable with other reputation systems.
A growing phenomenon of recent years has been the attempt to establish central reputational hubs across the web. Services like Trustcloud, Legit, Connect. me, Scaffold, Klout( and similar scores) and MiiCard are taking different approaches in developing a portable reputation systems, compared to the more traditional proliferation approach. Most of them are using algorithms to determine a score: these algorithms are taking data from social media in order to create a final number that represents the online reputation of a user.
The most commonly used social media, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, are growing as a tool to determine the reputation, thanks to strict name policies that does not allow anonymity. This approach feeds the trust during the exchanges, because there is a greater identity verification, with the idea of being able to declare reliable who has a public profile with many connections, open and prone to correspondence. Moreover, social media profiles are being used to foster reputation in some e‐government process: using the same concept of transparency( public profile = trust), the UK government is experimenting a new national identity scheme, called“ Identity assurance” 16 which will allow people to access online public services using as official identification documents either via their mobile phones or social media profiles.
5. The need of a new reputation system for e‐democracy
Reputation systems designed for the sharing economy are not properly suited for e‐governance processes, but are aimed for transactions, often financial. The context is totally different: an excellent reputation on p2p trading systems does not necessarily mean a good behaviour in participatory processes. Important theorizations have been proposed, however, to link the advantages of distributed reputation systems with public governance( Picci 2010). This could ensure a much needed transparency in public decision process. However, actual examples of using reputation systems in this field are not known.
There are further problems in the application of reputation systems to e‐governance / e‐democracy: for instance many of the numeric values of the reputation systems are calculated with closed algorithms. In public processes, where transparency is necessary to increase trust and exchangeability, we cannot rely on closed 16
See http:// digital. cabinetoffice. gov. uk
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