There are three broad types of trust that have been identified.
1. Policy-based trust – these will be the explicit expectations, policies, terms and conditions that MoreThan Talk will need to develop in order to sign up members. There will also need to be some easy to understand user instructions where expectations about the sort of behaviours which the site will not countenance may need to be developed. We have not really considered moderation of the site, but it might prove necessary to have a self-reporting system within the pages where abuse or misuse of the system can be reported and then someone from MoreThan Talk can moderate and take any appropriate action.
2. Provenance Based Trust – is about building up assurances about the origin of data or in our case the authenticity of the people who are making offers to help someone develop their language. Of course, it would be wonderful to be able to able to vet and validate everyone’s identity on the network, but that is simply not feasible. It might be technically possible to verify if someone completing a form is in the country they claim to be in, but there is little more than can be done about provenance.
3. Reputation-Based Trust – is probably the most important for MoreThan Talk. In our social network most of the assurances will need to be about the people who are using the network. We may need to involve a rating scheme for the quality of information provided. A process similar to a Trip Advisor five-star rating system. Users can build up a positive profile based on the help and advice they have offered others. For many users this would be quite an incentive to get involved and they would delight in gaining high levels of acceptance and gratitude from strangers. That said, it would not be difficult for people to play the system by creating and using false profiles.
Conclusion
Trust is key to the success of most Social Networks. Users need to trust both the site and trust each other. There are things that we are building into the structure of the site which should help build reputational trust – such as rating the advice received from other users. This should help build confidence in the users. We are also helping users to limit their visibility with each other until a level of personal trust has been built-up. This is going to be done by publishing limited profiles and hiding most personal data until the user is comfortable.
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