The Reputation Society

The Reputation Society
a forthcoming book edited by Hassan Masum, Mark Tovey, Yi-Cheng Zhang, and Michael Zimmer

How can higher-quality news media and public discourse be achieved?

What are effective ways to evaluate products and business partners?

Can liars and cheats be made more accountable?

How can the barrage of advertising and interesting ideas be filtered more effectively?

How can the best representatives of differing points of view be found and amplified?

Who do you trust? What should we believe?

The forthcoming book, The Reputation Society, will explain how reputation mechanisms can contribute to better answers for all these questions. The book will look at case studies of reputation in practical life, and consider the risks and long-term potential of this new technology. Expect a major update on this page in spring 2009.

For discussion on why we need a reputation infrastructure and where it might take us, one starting point is the Manifesto for the Reputation Society. If you are interested in further exploration, consider these sources:

MIT Reputation Mechanisms Symposium 2003 - technical papers on the design and behavior of reputation mechanisms.
Reputations Research Network - people and papers from the research community on reputation systems (not actively updated).
TOOL: The Open Opinion Layer - a vision of an open infrastructure for sharing opinions and reputations.
Happier World with More Information - mutually beneficial social relations from increased information.

Information overload, challenges of evaluating quality, and the opportunity to benefit from experiences of others have spurred the development of reputation systems. Most Internet sites which mediate between large numbers of people use some form of reputation mechanism: Slashdot, eBay, ePinions, Amazon, and Google all make use of collaborative filtering, recommender systems, or shared judgements of quality.

But we suggest the potential utility of reputation services is far greater, touching nearly every aspect of society. By leveraging our limited and local human judgement power with collective networked filtering, it is possible to promote an interconnected ecology of socially-beneficial reputation systems - to restrain the baser side of human nature, while unleashing positive social changes and enabling the realization of ever-higher goals.

...from "Manifesto for the Reputation Society"

Feedback: contact at hassanmasum dot com