If reputation systems weight all perspectives similarly, they may devolve into simple majority rule. But if they give each user reputation scores that take only other similar users’ opinions into account, they run the risk of becoming “echo chambers” in which like-minded people reinforce each others’ views without being open to outside perspectives. Massa discusses design choices and trust metrics that may help balance these two extremes and the broader implication for our future societies.

The book received endorsements by people I really admire.
“As our societies expand from local villages to global networks, our ways of assessing and sharing reputation—the foundation of trust and community—must also evolve, but how? The thoughtful and thought-provoking essays in The Reputation Society bring a wide range of perspectives to this question, including the design of technological solutions, applications in philanthropy, science and governance, and warnings about the loss of privacy and autonomy. It is a fascinating collection of readings not only for scholars, but for anyone interested in the dynamics of the reviews and recommendations that shape our decisions—or in the future of how we will judge and be judged.”
—Judith Donath, Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University

“The Reputation Society enriches the discussion of reputation by bringing together technologists, philosophers, legal scholars, and industry leaders to sort through the promise and perils we face today. It covers the practical, for those interested in the nuts and bolts of the challenges we face today, and the theoretical, for those looking to engage in broader discussions of the ethical and moral concerns. In short, a terrific and enlightening read!”
—Danielle Keats Citron, Professor of Law, University of Maryland School of Law

The list of my co-authors is also very delightful.
Trust, reputation systems, and the immune system of democracy / Craig Newmark –
Building the reputation society / Hassan Masum, Mark Tovey, & Yi-Cheng Zhang –
Designing reputation systems for the social web / Chrysanthos Dellarocas –
Web reputation systems and the real world / Randy Farmer –
An inquiry into effective reputation and rating systems / John Henry Clippinger –
The biology of reputation / John Whitfield –
Regulating reputation / Eric Goldman –
Less regulation, more reputation / Lior Strahilevitz –
The role of reputation systems in managing online communities / Cliff Lampe –
Attention philanthropy : giving reputation a boost / Alex Steffen –
Making use of reputation systems in philanthropy / Marc Maxson & Mari Kuraishi –
The measurement and mismeasurement of science / Michael Nielsen –
Usage-based reputation metrics in science / Victor Henning, Jason Hoyt, and Jan Reichelt –
Open access and academic reputation / John Willinsky –
Reputation-based governance and making states “legible” to their citizens / Lucio Picci –
Trust it forward : tyranny of the majority or echo chambers? / Paolo Massa –
Rating in large-scale argumentation systems / Luca Iandoli, Josh Introne, & Mark Klein –
Privacy, context, and oversharing : reputational challenges in a Web 2.0 world / Michael Zimmer & Anthony Hoffman –
The future of reputation networks / Jamais Cascio –
“I hope you know this is going on your permanent record” / Madeline Ashby & Cory Doctorow.

The cover of the book reads as follows.

In making decisions, we often seek advice. Online, we check Amazon recommendations, eBay vendors’ histories, TripAdvisor ratings, and even our elected representatives’ voting records. These online reputation systems serve as filters for information overload. In this book, experts discuss the benefits and risks of such online tools.

The contributors offer expert perspectives that range from philanthropy and open access to science and law, addressing reputation systems in theory and practice. Properly designed reputation systems, they argue, have the potential to create a “reputation society,” reshaping society for the better by promoting accountability through the mediated judgments of billions of people. Effective design can also steer systems away from the pitfalls of online opinion sharing by motivating truth-telling, protecting personal privacy, and discouraging digital vigilantism.

Credit: The image on top is Creative Commons BY-SA.

P.S.: At Wikisym I’m also going to demo our web tool on comparing points of view of different language communities of Wikipedia, i.e. Manypedia.

Dealing with the emotional, persuasive, or other aspects of creative language content in the texts – Strapparava explains- is commonly considered to be off limits for any computational ability. Actually, these features are a key part of communicating, and it is important that research in the field of natural language processing deal with it. The usefulness of automatic recognition of these aspects is nowadays even greater, given the enormous daily production of texts on the web. Through these technologies, it will also be possible to predict the emotional or persuasive content of a text.

Congrats Carlo!

The successful candidate will join our group working on a project whose goal is to mine, analyze and computationally model the individual and collective behaviour in communities and social networks of Wikipedia users.
The ideal candidate should have:
* Ph.D. level education in a relevant discipline
* A good record of relevant research published in peer-reviewed conferences or journals
* Strong empirical and analytical orientation, with experience in handling large amounts of data coming from user action logs and social networks
* Experience with statistics and with analysis of complex networks
* Knowledge of at least one of Python, Perl, C/C++, R, Java
* Proficiency in both written and spoken English
Additional requirements:
* Prior experience in using social media for disseminating personal research
* Interdisciplinary background
* Experience with GNU/Linux systems

Type of contract: co.co.pro (collaboration contract) for one year. Initial appointments are for one year and renewal is based on performance. Gross Salary offer will be approximately Euro 22.500,00 and can be increased based on experience and skills of the candidate.

Feel free to contact me if you have any question and you can find more information about how to apply.

The conference was smaller than what I expected but interesting. There were some people working on Wikipedia and I had many interesting conversations with them.
The best talk was hands down the one by Noshir Contractor titled “From Disasters to WoW: Using Web Science to Understand and Enable 21st Century Multidimensional Networks”. He spoke about the many different great works is doing in an entertaining and funny style. The main methodological take-away message I got is that he is looking at networks at the edge level, considering the “motivation” for each edge (positive/negative links, in fact) and seeing how much different established sociological theories such as homophily, social balance, winner takes it all, etc are able to explain the topology of the network. For example 4 networks extracted from 4 different kinds of interactions of the same users of an online massive multi player game (I think “who fights with whom, who is in guild with whom, who exchanges messages with whoms, who trades goods with whom) exhibit different patterns and the particular orientation of a certain network can be explained by the balance of the motivations explained by the different theories. In particular the network of “who trades goods with whom” has special “motivations” that are influenced by the presence of so-called goldfarmers, people typically in China or other average-low-income countries who play online games doing repetitive tasks with the goal to acquire in-game currency that is usually sold against real-world currency to other players. One of their paper about this “Mapping Gold Farming Back to Offline Clandestine Organizations: Methodological, Theoretical, and Ethical Challenges” won the award for Best Paper at the recent Game Behind the Game conference. What I was really surprised to hear is that he is working as well on Wikipedia!
In fact, in his keynote, Noshir presented some recent work he has been doing with one of his students, Brian Keegan, about Wikipedia’s coverage of breaking news articles such as the Japan earthquake. Interestingly Michela Ferron and I wrote a paper titled “Wikipedia as a Lens for Studying the Real-time Formation of Collective Memories of Revolutions” in which we highlight the richness of the phenomena of collective memory building on Wikipedia about the current north-African revolutions (all the Wikipedia pages get created few minutes or days after the events and receive an incredible number of edits from many different users, what we interpret as a process of collective memory building) and we discuss research directions (more info about this in a next blog post). Out article was recently accepted in the “International Journal of Communication” and we are of course delighted by that. Actually the editor of IJoC is Manuel Castells, who will be giving a keynote at the upcoming ICWSM about … guess what? Social Media and Wiki-Revolutions: The New Frontier of Political Change. I guess it is really a hot topic nowadays, which is both conforting (we are doing cool stuff) and worrying (because these guys are really good and it is hard to do better … but we will try ;)
Actually in two weeks Noshir will come to Trento to give a one week course on Social Network Analysis which I’m really looking forward to attend and I hope to gather further insights via discussions with him.
The other guys who presented works about Wikipedia at Hypertext conference were David Laniado and his colleagues from Barcelona Media who presented “Co-authorship 2.0: Patterns of collaboration in Wikipedia“, an interesting analysis of networks of coediting on Wikipedia and its comparison with networks of scientific co-authoring. He was also there with a poster about “Automatically assigning Wikipedia articles to macro-categories”, joint work with Jacopo Farina and David Laniado.
There was also another very interesting work titled “Social Capital Increases Efficiency of Collaboration Among Wikipedia Editors” presented by Keiichi Nemoto of Fuji Xerox who was working with Peter Gloor and Robert Laubacher of MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. They found the more cohesive and more centralized the collaboration network of Wikipedia editors and the more network members were already collaborating before starting to work together on an article, the faster the article they work on will be promoted to good or featured article.
Overall it was good to discover interesting projects and meet good people working on Wikipedia which I hope I’ll keep meeting at future conferences.

Today I announce that on June 4th and 5th, Random Hacks of Kindness (RHOK) is coming to Trento too (precisely in the research center where I work).
The goal is to put together hackers, coders, designers, engineers, programmers and geeks of every variety to tackle some real-world problems (disaster risk and climate change) and hack for humanity.
RHOK is going to take place in 15 locations around the globe and among them there is Trento, the smallest of the participating cities in fact. Below the list of cities where RHOK will take place simultaneously with the number of inhabitants (data from Wikipedia).

Actually I agree with Ken Thompson that in “Reflections on Trusting Trust” (Communication of the ACM, Vol. 27, No. 8, August 1984, pp. 761-763) claimed You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (It it very pertinent also that in the paper the very next sentence is Especially code from companies that employ people like me).

As last point, I would like to say that I prefer to trust the transparent social process that happens, for example, on Wikipedia. On pages such as “Climate Change” hundreds of different editors participate and, even if Wikipedia policy asks to write from a Neutral Point of View, it is undeniable that many of them have strong POVs. This is very visible on controversial pages such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for example.
What I prefer of Wikipedia, over the objective, algorithmic intermediary provided by Google, is the fact the process is carried out by humans (this is not completely true since there are many automatic bots on Wikipedia but currently they perform mainly maintenance tasks) and, more importantly, the fact you can analyze the complete history of edits (and who made them) that brought each article to its current state. Moreover, if you don’t agree with the current framing of a concept, you can get involved and contribute your POV by editing the page or discussing it in the related talk page.
Let me highlight also how the FAQ about Neutral Point of View on Wikipedia clearly states that “the NPOV policy says nothing about objectivity. In particular, the policy does not say that there is such a thing as objectivity in a philosophical sense—a “view from nowhere” (to use Thomas Nagel’s phrase), such that articles written from that viewpoint are consequently objectively true.”
Let me conclude with the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi which in “La ginestra” (Wild Broom) was lamenting “le magnifiche sorti e progressive” (the “magnificent and progressive fate”) of the human race. I think we should do it all a bit more than we currently do instead of embracing algorithmic objectivity.

Image: Giacomo Leopardi from Wikipedia (in the public domain)

It was a very interactive talk and I enjoyed it very much. I used for the first time VisibleTweets: students could write twitter messages with tag #isdsn and these tweets were automatically shown on another screen by VisibleTweets. Unfortunately not all students had a connection so it was less interactive than what I hoped but still very interesting [note for myself: VisibleTweets probably works better if the talk is given by at least two people because it is hard to read twits and talk, and the audience (as expected) challenges you and tries to "steal" the attention from you (to their witty twits)]. I also showed many videos (see the slides): from CommonCraft, from the movies Ratatouille and The pursuit of Happyness, some from Socialnomics.com and one by Corrado Guzzanti, an Italian comedian. It is incredible the power of movies in waking up your audience! ;)
The talk was full of real examples such as successes and failures in using Twitter, Facebook and other social media, both in the Italian context and worldwide (I didn’t avoid talking a bit about Wikipedia when exploring concepts such as wikinomics and crowdsourcing of course!)
There were some interesting projects by will-be entrepreneurs and I wish them all the best, for their future and the future of Italy.
Well, if you are interested in the slides, you can get them on Slideshare.

View 7 July 2005 London bombings and over 3,000,000 other topics on Qwiki.

Qwiki gets info from a Wikipedia page and automatically reads a text summary (synchronise with the text), adding images from different sources.
It is amazing! I can imagine students in schools pondering “instead of listening this boring professor about history of Europe, I’ll check the qwiking of it” (see below).

View History of Europe

Or do you want to quickly get an idea about the recent 2011 Egyptian revolution? Nothing better than qwiking it (see below).

View 2011 Egyptian revolution and over 3,000,000 other topics on Qwiki.

Well, you can compare these videos with the reports created by professional journalists of CNN or BBC and pondering how far we are from automatic generation in real-time of news reports.
Currently most videos are short (even when the corresponding pages are very long) and this totally makes sense from Qwiki perspective but I guess we are not far away from automatic generation of school lessons about geography, history or literature (and more). For example check the qwiking of the Trento, the city where I live and work.

View Trento and over 3,000,000 other topics on Qwiki.

And as an early feedbacker was saying, I’m nearly in tears. This is so beautiful.