Marco Bani and Stefano De Paoli
facilities to allow badge receiver to display their badges. However badges could have a much significant impact if their circulation involves the large digital media ecosystems.
Figure 2: Hypothesis for a shared badges framework fostering“ civic reputation”
8. Conclusion
In this paper we analyzed new systems of participation and transparency, based on the concept of digital civics and the use of civic reputation to build a bottom‐up and social media driven democratic process. This is a new way to define democracy, with a major involvement in the public sphere of ordinary people rather than leaders or hierarchical structures or organizations. We believe that reputation will increasingly play a relevant role in the construction of this“ we‐democracy” based on shared and trusted relations among actors.
In order to foster this vision, we proposed a preliminary vision for a shared reputation framework to federate several digital civics initiatives based on the concept of digital badge. The framework aims to avoid the proliferation of reputation systems that could indeed hinder collaborative initiatives in this field. Clearly the civic badges framework that we have described in this paper is far from being complete. For achieving our goal however we follow an approximation approach seeking to do one step at a time. Here we list some problems that future work should address:
• How the management of the federated framework will be organized? Will there be a third party( transparent and no‐profit entity) managing or will there be a sort of scientific board?
• Who will create, design, develop and finally manage the federate framework? A consortium of digital civics or a non‐profit organization?
• How and which decisions on the badge system( e. g. what to represent, rules upon which award badges) will be taken?
References
Aristotele, and Benjamin J.( 2000) Politics, Dover Publications, New York. Botsman, R., and Roo R.( 2010) What’ s mine is yours: the rise of collaborative consumption, Harper Business, New York. Brunsting, S., and Postmes T.( 2002)“ Social Movement Participation in the Digital Age: Predicting Offline and Online
Collective Action.” Small Group Research 33, no. 5( October 1, 2002), pp. 525 – 554.. Crouch, C.( 2004) Post‐Democracy. Wiley, New York.
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