Marco Bani and Stefano De Paoli
and arbitrary algorithms. Moreover, the use of reputation systems managed by private companies raise several privacy concerns: a report by the European Network and Information Security Agency( ENISA 2011) identified several areas of risk for users. The report warned of security risks that could expose personal data to hackers and the high probability of being attacked by cybercriminals. In addition, the monetization of these models is still unclear. Are they going to sell users date? Are they going to share the analytics behind the behaviour of users, thanks the " linkability " of social platforms?
For all these reasons, reputation systems designed for a p2p economy are not very suitable for the democratic process because they are denying a shared framework, compulsory in the digital public sphere, and for their lack of trustworthiness of their reputation scores. Reputation simply cannot be a currency if individuals have different skills and specializations.
The use of social media as a tool for reputation is an intriguing experiment, but it creates other problems. For instance privacy issues are continuously debated, and the permanent accumulation of data in the hands of private companies raises many concerns. Moreover, a process of identity verification via social media does not increase the reputation of participation processes: certainly a single user social media profile that has much public information can give greater credibility to the person, but it is yet unclear whether it could create a system of " civic reputation " that is based on the behaviors performed by the citizen in various civic actions.
6. The civic reputation
The“ civic reputation” aims to give a trace of actions performed online through digital civics, to give a shared framework to the various processes of participation and transparency. The life of a community is based on mutual trust and the digital public sphere should aim at simulating the dynamics of offline participation. The civic reputation could also allow to avoid some of the problems of e‐democracy processes that use digital civics: the risk of pollution using anonymity. In fact, the political lobbying by companies or minorities who seek to achieve a particular interest, can hide behind private profiles, pseudonyms, fake id, to influence online decisions in their favor. Moreover, compared with offline actions, participation in online actions was slightly more motivated by cognitive calculations( efficacy) and less by affective factors( identification)( Brunsting and Postmes 2002). Using a reputation system makes it possible a better identification, in order to gain trust and lower the barrier between the online and the offline community.
Anonymity must instead be recommended to use in other digital civics:
• In reporting criminal acts, where there is a risk of exposing themselves to retaliation
• To allow minorities to use a public space to share their problems
• In the reporting process, to speed up reports and not hinder the participation
7. Digital dadges: A new reputation model for digital civics?
We believe that a promising approach to foster reputation in digital civics is using the concept of badge. A badge is a visual representation of an accomplishment, skill or reputation gained in the context of a specific community. Badges can act as effective representations of contributions to digital civic life. Digital Badges are often devised in order to make the participation in social media more engaging and motivating( Halavais 2012; De Paoli et al. 2012). Obtaining a badge is something that should motivate users and it is also a mark of achievements within a community. Badges may also support the transferability of skills, reputation and / or achievements to other platforms.
A recent Digital Media and Learning Competition supported by the MacArthur Foundation has been entirely focused on badges in order to foster Online Informal Learning. The competition has had tracks related to pure research on badges as well as on the design of badge systems. Most importantly, the design competition asked for the production of badges that could augment the infrastructure of the Mozilla Open Badge project 17.
As stated on the homepage of the project“ Mozilla Open Badges helps solve that problem, making it easy for any organization to issue, manage and display digital badges across the web.”. The OpenBadge is an 17
See http:// openbadges. org /
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