Yesterday I was talking to a friend about using 'feedback' for the purpose of establishing trust in a community. One of his coordinators has raised issues, and we were wondering on how to best increase mechanisms to measure trustworthy people - right now the community consists mainly of people that know eachother but once it opens up, it is expected to dilute the overall trust between partipants.
I sent him an article later that day about the work that Amazon and eBay have done to establish trust in online communities. "Some things are more relevant than others", I told him, "but for these companies trust is a very important exponent in their survival." It's not only about the experts in the community seeing whether they are doing allright, but also a way for non-experts or novices in the community to quickly assess who the 'highly-rated' (and therefore likely to be respectabe) people in the community are. So there is value for all kinds of participants.
The two most famous online communities that have made this building trust are eBay and Amazon. Both in different ways though, because eBay uses the "feedback" option as the only way to interact and build trust in the community. Amazon on the other hand has feedback (and lists) to complement it's business (selling books etc) and uses the community to enhance its core competences. This distinction is of course due to the fact that eBay's main business is about the community (transactions in that community, to be precise) and does not sell anything itself (in other words without the community there is no eBay) whereas Amazon can still make money without the feedback and community work.
The eBay feedback system is very simple in design though powerful in its application. If you have made a transaction (either buyer or seller) you can provide feedback to the other party. There are three types, "positive, negative and neutral". A person's score is the sum of the positive (+1) and the negative (-1) feedbacks.
Most eBayers, when considering a bid, look not only at the score of the vendor but also the number of feedbacks he has had. The common sense is that a vendor with 3 positives out of three may be less trustworthy than a vendor with 1087 positives out of 1100. So, building a reputation in this feedback system is vital. Vice versa, a buyer with good feedback from previous vendors may provide quick and safe transaction.
If you look at eBay's feedback system (or read Resnicks studies on eBay) it becomes apparent that most feedbacks are very positive and comments are overdone. Zeckenhauser added to this "That study also showed that, perhaps surprisingly, more than 99 percent of feedback on sellers was positive". Yet Resnick found that a vendor with high feedback is likely to get a better price for the same product, than someone with a lower feedback (there's some good stories on this work to be found via Google, alternatively the report in PDF can be seen here).
Useful to apply in corporate environments? Siemens has done so - where feedback and a bonus/malus system contributed to someone's status and rating. The big difference between the marketplace of eBay, where trust is used to exchange knowledge and is basically transactional, and a corporate community however is evident: in the corporate community of practice, feedback may be useful to underline participant's reputation that already can exist in the offline community, but will most likely not drive decisions in a transactional sense.
Experiences and relationships, which do exist in the corporate communities of practice will take care of most of the joint work to 'rate' ideas and provide reputation. Only where these ties and relationships are weak, a feedback system may provide the extra help to establish trust with strangers - and the conversation should further extend that trust.
This happened at 5:21:49 PM or
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