“How reputation evaluation can help WEB2.0, Enterprise2.0 and other type of Cooperative Digital Communities to improve User Generated Contents quality, foster participation and community growth, putting in practice business models that use reputation as a community digital currency.”
Cristian Brotto
Ph.D. Candidate – Università Degli studi dell’Insubria (Varese),
Software Engineer and Business Intelligence Consultant.
Email: cristian.brotto@gmail.com
Linkedin: http://it.linkedin.com/in/cristianbrotto
Twitter: http://twitter.com/cristianbrotto
Sito: www.webbrainys.com:3000
Many among the largest WEB2.0 communities are built upon the concept of Users Generated Contents (UGC), a business model in which the members of the community are also the creators of the contents/resources the community rely on. Notable examples of this kind are the cooperative encyclopedia Wikipedia.org and the video-sharing service YouTube.com.
This type of systems sometimes provides means to cooperatively evaluate and classify the resources the users share, but the vast majority of them lack an accurate ranking system for their most proficient members and none of them includes effective rewarding mechanisms.
Although rough, the current technology seems to be sufficient to confer to some cooperative web communities a good success, which for the most part appears to be due to their core-members passion and commitment. Nevertheless, deficiencies like the ones described usually involve that over time only a small amount of the members keep committed and willing to produce resources of a certain quality. This tendency leads to the situation in which, although the community grows in terms of numbers, in proportion its value decreases.
Providing cooperative communities with effective rewarding systems could solve the problem. Unfortunately this approach rarely and loosely has been implemented so far. The reason is that the task involves several not trivial side problems. The biggest is the necessity of an advanced ranking mechanism to evaluate the members of the community. Such a method should consider complex factors like competence and commitment, but at the same time it should be easily understandable and shared by the members of the community. Also, in order to make sure that the members agree with the rating system it must involve their collaboration, which implies finding ways to prevent misuse.
This is not an easy task, nonetheless considering the fast diffusion of web2.0 communities and the new emerging Enterprise2.0 communities the problem is no longer to be underestimated.
Digital communities should start thinking of new means to rise their quality standards in order to keep effective and successful over time.
One solution to the problem could be the adoption of an RCE business model (Reputation Community Evaluation). The RCE model exploits users reputation, rather than only competence and/or commitment, as evaluation parameter, and implements ways to use reputation as a digital currency in order to promote an healthy community growth.
The assumption is that communities equipped with a reputation system can benefit of a raise in their value. Using an RCE business model this rise in value can be then capitalized and redistributed among its most proficient members and the system provider.
To truly understand the real value of reputation we need to set our minds to think of reputation as a monetary capital, as a matter of fact although by personal experience we all have an idea of what reputation means, this idea is often partial and doesn’t cover all the complexity and potential that reputation involves.
Reputation as a Social and a Real Capital
Reputation is about what you do, what you say, and above all what other people say about you. This latter aspect implies reputation to be partially biased by people specific points of view. Reputation evaluation is therefore, by the very nature of reputation itself, a very complicated task.
There are many websites with reputation systems of some sort. The eBay system is undoubtedly the biggest and best known and is also a clear example of the economical implications that a reputation system can have in an online community.
Reputation itself is in economy addressed as a social currency, in the sense that it has an INTANGIBLE VALUE yet it is CONCRETELY SPENDABLE and therefore can be exploited at the level of every other type of economical capital. Even more, reputation has properties beyond the traditional capitals, it is: secure and transitive [3].
Secure because reputations cannot be subverted, and the source of reputation assertions can always be traced, especially in online systems. Transitive because, as an example, if A trusts B, and B trusts C, then it could be determined that A trusts C.
The economical implications of reputation in online systems have been in the last few years evaluated by a discrete number of theoretical studies and a fairly large number of empirical studies which for the most part involved the study of the effects of eBayʼs reputation system on sales.
These studies demonstrate that a reputation system is able to affect the perception of the quality of the goods. An item associated with the reputation of a seller is more valuable than the same item not “tagged” with any reputation information. So it is clear that a reputation system increases not only the value of single item but also of the system as a whole. For instance, eBay without any reputation system would be much less valuable than the current eBay and likely less popular.
For this reason automated reputation mechanisms should not be designed without regards to the “economy of reputation”, but through a careful consideration of both the computational and the economical aspects.
There are also several issues that any robust reputation system needs to solve to be effective. Following some among the most important.
