Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Assignment 7: Jeanette D. Pineiro
I recently joined the planning committee for a Global Development conference that is taking place in Cornell next fall. This offline community shares several things in common, such as being interested in global development issues and doing what we can to help. The reputation system for the planning committee can be similar to that of a class. When you attend meetings it is noted and helps build a member’s reputation. Trust is essential in this community because each member is being trusted to complete the jobs or tasks that are assigned to them. If one member fails to do this then it may slow down the group as a whole. Often tasks are interconnected so if one group is falling behind then it will cause a domino effect for other groups, which could compromise the conference in the long run. Desirable behaviors include getting your job done in a timely manner, helping others if they need help, asking for help if you need it yourself, and attending a good amount of meetings. Members are rewarded because they are trusted with more responsibilities and can play a bigger part in the preparation of the conference. However, people can manipulate this by stealing other members’ ideas and claiming it as their own. Also they may miss meetings and claim it is because they have work or are sick when in fact you really have no way of knowing for sure if that is true or not.
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It might be better to have your reputation system based on quality of contributions to the group, rather than activity such as attendance to the meetings. Where do you keep track of your reputation system and do all members have access to the scores? Is there a voting process for your reputation system, or does the president or executive board of your club rate each member? Who is part of the voting process? I see that trust plays a big role in the tasks of the group, but does trust play a role in the reputation system of the group?
ReplyDeleteI agree with Rachel about basing reputation on quality of contributions to the group, although measuring attendance of meetings I'm sure would correlate with a good reputation in general unless you were infamous for being annoying at meetings. A really interesting questions is how do you do measure quality of contributions? You could have members anonymously rate each other, but it might be hard to get them to do that if there's no obvious benefit for them. From a information science standpoint, it's interesting to think about what about a contribution makes it valuable, and how could you design an algorithm to try and detect that?
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