National Society of Black Engineers(NSBE) is the community offline that I will use for this assignment. The organization is student run and comprises of over 25,000 members. Trust matters greatly in this community especially being a large student run organization where each member depends on the other to do their part to maintain success. These include paying dues, helping spread the message of NSBE, attending conferences, applying to internships and jobs, keeping grades up, and doing their share of the work to make each chapter run smoothly amongst others. There has to be trust that the chairman and the elected officials of the various boards will do there jobs and work with the best interest of NSBE at hand. Each person is vulnerable to a decision of everyone else, if the chairman quits then that would effect the whole organization. The relationships built become more than business relationships, they become "emotional trust" since everyone has to work together collectively and be the support system of one another in order to get work done. There is also cognitive trust in the capabilities of others counterparts.
The desired behavior is being a hard worker and trust worthy. Most of the chairmans and other officials elected have to have a good reputation from his or her peers much like the rating reputation system for Ebay. Resnick shows this when he states "isolated interactions take attributes of long term relationships". Alot of NSBE members began while in high school so over the years they connect and begin to see those who distinguish themselves as leaders in the organization who are trustworthy. The members who are the most trust worthy or respected win elections and receive awards based on their dedication and hardwork. some loop holes to the system is if people only vote on popularity and not the acheivements of those running for positions. As Resnick elaborates on, the more information known about someone, the more they could be trusted. Those individuals with the best reputations get the most accolades. These reputations have to be as Resnick states based on ensured honest reports. Members would not like being in the organization if the chairman only wanted to connect people from his college with employers and thats it.
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On campus organizations do deal with a lot of trust and I know that if all the cogs aren't meshing together the system is going to rust and fall apart. With that being said I have seen organizations fall apart due to loop holes like popularity contests among group members. It actually happens fairly frequently, and this tends to render the traditional rating reputation system obsolete especially when it comes to offline communities where, for the most part, people have a relationship with the people they are working with. Do you think there is a true way to alleviate the problems of popularity contests and social loopholes in both online and off line communities?
ReplyDeleteWhen you mention trust, you bring up the fact that trust is needed since people need to depend on each other. This can relate to tightly coupled tasks which require one person to be dependent on another. It's kind of cool how the two concepts intertwine, don't you agree?
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