TRUST IN ONLINE PROFESSIONAL COMMUNITIES

There seem to be a lot of people out there who feel that trust in virtual communities is a problem because of lack of face to face (f2f) contact. I suspect that may be true in places like chat rooms, in which people are anonymous and strangers.

I participate in a number of online communities, such as the Association for Internet Research and DC ICT in Africa listserve. I am a co-editor of the ICT for Development Topic for the Development Gateway. In communities like these, I wonder if the Internet doesn't allow more validation of trustworthiness than in f2f.

I visit the websites of the people who form the core community of practice in these online groups, and check on some of their blogs. As a result, I know job histories and I know the institutions that have warranted the work of the key members. I find that I correspond by email with colleagues about other colleagues and their credibility.

In f2f situations I don't have nearly as much background on people.

Eszter Hargittai got me to thinking about this subject when I read the paper she and her co-authors published: “The Social Implications of the Internet” in the 2001 Annual Review of Sociology. It mentions the E-Bay approaches to warranting those engaging in transactions. I find E-Bay great since it provides extensive feedback on the transactions people have made in its auctions. I check these transaction histories, including for those selling, and for those bidding against me. I look not only on the ratings, but on the specific items bought and sold. And I don’t buy from people who don’t have track records.

Amazon.com has a different approach to warranting books. It posts published reviews of many books, and encourages customers to publish reviews, providing an easy feedback mechanism allowing other customers to grade those reviews. The Amazon customer also has, in addition to the information on the publisher and provided by the publisher, information on other publications by the authors/editors, and information on the popularity of the publication. Browsing the Internet bookstore seems to put more information about the credibility of books at the customer’s fingertips than browsing the shelves of traditional bookstores.

Scientific and technological journals warrant the credibility of the information the publish through a peer review process, supported by the policy of retracting articles which are successfully challenged. More fundamentally perhaps, their standards require assertions to be supported by systematic observations, and to be justified in terms of accepted bodies of theory.

There is of course a whole literature on the difference between information and knowledge. I personally tend to focus on one difference—that knowledge is internalized within people (and perhaps groups of people) while information is external. “I know” but information can be in bits or bytes, or on the printed page.

Surely another dimension of “knowing” is the degree of certainty that can be assigned to the validity and accuracy of assertions. I think that:
· an assertion made in a good scientific journal is more credible than one made extemporaneously in a scientific meeting;
· an assertion on the quality of merchandise by a seller with thousands of satisfied customer responses logged more credible than an assertion by new E-Bay vendor or one shielding his identity; and
· an assertion made by a book from a major publisher with a large readership and strong review comments more credible than that by a book from an unknown publisher that is not positively reviewed.
I may really feel that I know something that I feel is fully supported by the scientific community on the basis of evidence, but that I only suspect something to be true that I read in a chat room or heard in a conversation.

So validation of assertions is critical to knowledge. In some respects, as described above, some communities on the Internet are already rather good in validation of information. It probably would be a good idea to focus still more on such issues, especially for those who like me help edit a portal serving a development community.

How can we improve feedback from users to better calibrate the validity, accuracy, and timeliness of the information we provide? How can we assure that the descriptions of the resources we provide include the key data (such as author, place published, date of publication) to establish credibility of the resource. How can we assure that the biographical information provided by community members is adequate to judge their knowledge credentials? That it is true? How do we assure that the overall credibility of the portfolio of resources provided by the portal is high enough to engender the confidence of its users? How does one weed out resources that are no longer sufficiently credible and timely? How does one find new credible resources sufficiently quickly that they meet the users needs for timeliness?