2.3.2 Building Connection — Trust in Online Communities
Chapter 2 of Design for Human Connection within Global Communities — An exploration through digital experience design and participatory action research
Wilson and Peterson (2002) considers community a hard focus for study, generally because it appears to indicate a false coherence. They propose that “individuals belong to many communities, bounded to different extents and in varying ways”. Due to the evolution of the internet and computer-based devices, notably smartphones, people are now transferring at least part of their social activities to online settings, having the chance to connect to people and join communities around the world through social networks.
The success of social networks depends on the level of trust that members have with each other as well as with the platform provider (Sherchan, Nepal and Paris, 2013). However, it is challenging to map trust because of their subjective properties (Ruan and Durresi, 2016). The concept of trust is analysed in several disciplines and, as a result, there are many explanations for it (Husted, 1998). One of the contemporary definitions is provided by Cho, Chan and Adali (2015):
“Trust is the willingness of the trustor (evaluator) to take risk based on a subjective belief that a trustee (evaluatee) will exhibit reliable behaviour to maximise the trustor’s interest under uncertainty (e.g., ambiguity due to conflicting evidence and/or ignorance caused by complete lack of evidence) of a given situation based on the cognitive assessment of past experience with the trustee.”
Considering that online social communities are distributed it is expected to create ways to deduce trust among members who are not necessarily directly connected. Trust computation models can be categorised in local and global trust models (Massa and Avesani, 2004). The local trust model assumes the trust within two users based on their direct interplay, whereas a global model measures the reputation of a member within the entire community. Gohari, Aliee and Haghighi (2019) propose a Dynamic Local-Global Trust-aware Recommendation approach that represents a hybrid model of local and global trust. The study showed that the decision on whether to select a user as a trustworthy depended on the past interactions between them (i.e., local trust) and the recommendations received from other members of the community about each other (i.e., global trust).
According to Sherchan, Nepal and Paris (2013), trust models for social networks should include two perspectives of trust: sociological and computational. The sociological perspective includes emotion, behaviour, attitude, and experience of the members. The computational aspect should present a concept of capturing and measuring these sociological forces. To that end, according to Sherchan, Nepal and Paris, designing ways to allow visualisation of trust relationships is a valuable method for disseminating trust and encourage positive behaviour.
Trust is usually built through regular daily interactions and, in a distributed community, the interactions demand more significant attention. Constant communication and rituals are the keys to promote trust (Menabney, 2019), using technology as a tool to allow people to connect with each other’s humanity when apart. Above all, to build connection is to promote meaningful conversations and communities based on trust, providing space for vulnerability, reflection and sense-making.
Read 3. Methodology — Design Thinking, Design Research & Action Research
