Four Trust Metrics

Community builders have experimented with a variety of competing "trust metrics" in the last decade. Here is an outline of four prominent metrics.

1. By Invitation Only
Some online communities follow the time-tested model of the art world's offline recognition mechanisms, where a single person or jury decides who's in and who's out. Even Web sites controlled by a gatekeeper, however, can range from strictly controlled to fairly egalitarian; the artists featured in online exhibitions like Beyond Interface or CODeDOC represent a curator's rolodex more than an entire community, while e-mail lists like nettime permit a fairly diverse scattering of opinions even while their moderators are kept busy censoring or digesting a high volume of posts.

Ironically, it is often the smallest communities of invited participants that compete on the most level playing field, for the rules are understood by all participants and there is plenty of room for each of them to contribute in an egalitarian fashion.

One example is the distributed journalism site MadMundo ([ <A Href="http://madmundo.tv" target="\_blank">http://madmundo.tv</A> ]<A Href="http://madmundo.tv" target="\_blank">http://madmundo.tv</A>), which borrows conventional journalism's stable of reporters, expert commentators, and a centralized news outlet, but investigates a question that originates in the mind of a single citizen, from an out-of-work auto worker in Brazil who wants to know why he lost his job to the widow of a 9/11 pilot who wants to know what the world's nations are doing about aerial terrorism. Another is The Plaintext Players (<A Href="http://yin.arts.uci.edu/~players/" target="\_blank">http://yin.arts.uci.edu/~players/</A>), who improvise dramas based on loosely prepared scenarios in text-based online environments such as MOOs. For each series, founder Antoinette LaFarge or a guest director finds and casts the performers and directs the performances in real time.

2. Free for All
To many the Internet may represent the last great hope for a truly democratic society, but to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, democracy is rarely pure and never simple. And the designers of egalitarian communities have it a lot worse than the founders of the U.S. constitution; Ben Franklin and Tom Jefferson never had to worry about schizoid avatars, crypto-anarchists, or viruses in e-mail attachments. One of the biggest challenges is the fact that the more popular an open community, the less secure reliable the level of discourse. As Clay Shirky has noted, many-to-many communities that grow too large tend to become one-to-many audiences; most visitors to have little time or substance to contribute and hence lurk without posting. At the same time, large communities can be doomed by their own success, because their increased visibility attracts cranks, spammers, and trolls.

In communities with thousands of members, where it is harder for every participant to know, and hence trust, every other participant, collaboration in building the community tends to be more asymmetric: the founders wield more control than the other participants, because the founders set the ground rules. A subtle means of controlling the signal-to-noise ratio is to craft an interface that restricts the form expression takes in a given community.

Some on this forum have already commented on the constraints Mr. Wong's Soup'Artments and Communimage place on their contributors. But some constraints are more interesting than others; some creative examples from the past include Alexei Shulgin's Desktop IS (<A Href="http://www.easylife.org/desktop/" target="\_blank">http://www.easylife.org/desktop/</A>), Martin Wattenberg and Marek Walczak's Apartment ([ <A Href="http://www.turbulence.org/Works/apartment/" target="\_blank">http://www.turbulence.org/Works/apartment/</A> ]<A Href="http://www.turbulence.org/Works/apartment/" target="\_blank">http://www.turbulence.org/Works/apartment/</A>), and Alex Galloway's .sig generator for Rhizome, Keiko.Suzuki.slogan.cgi, which was inspired by similar innovations on the 7-11 discussion list.

3. Call and response
Paradigms for hybrid structures of control and freedom can be found in very different realms. Augusto Boal's experiments in "Theater of the Oppressed" suggest some ways that performance can be structured to eliminate the player/audience divide. Other community models focus on a more explicit agenda rather than a social or aesthetic focus. These agenda-driven communities populate much Web real estate, from bungie-jumping blogs to women's health web rings, from literary indexes like WebDelSol to on-the fly Google lists of sky-diving tips. Linus Torvald's initial e-mail soliciting help in building a new operating system kernel produced an enormous outpouring of effort and enthusiasm, even though the agenda had already been set by someone else. Common interests do not always produce community, but when they do, such communities can manifest a loyalty that makes their members more likely to tolerate some degree of structural inequality.

Another good example of call-and-response is Derek Powazak's {Fray} ([ <A Href="http://fray.com/" target="\_blank">http://fray.com/</A> ]<A Href="http://fray.com/" target="\_blank">http://fray.com/</A>), which has been publishing short, non-fiction stories at a rate of about one per month since 1996. Each story features a catchy opener, followed by the rest of the story laid out in visually arresting landscape or design, a final question, and an opening for readers to post similar stories.

4. Police thyself
Although they never had the digital tools to perfect their vision, artists in the Fluxus movement from the 1960s recognized the potential of what art historian Craig Saper calls "intimate bureaucracies." Josef Beuys, for example, founded the German Green Party and Free International University with the goal of exploring the "possibility of decentralized self-administration."

In the present day, technology-powered communities can harness their own members' energy to distill the chaotic content produced by open access into some elegant, focused format. Often this is done by some form of peer-filtering mechanism that selects content for relevance or quality. This kind of peer filtering enables communities to remain open without becoming too unruly. Such quality or relevance control ensures the loyalty of the most committed members, while allowing newcomers to earn their place within the community. Quality remains high without compromising a kind of radical democracy. Some of these communities rely on the labor of their members, others rely on structures built into the code, and still others use both methods.

Prominent examples of "police thyself" communities include Slashdot ([ <A Href="http://slashdot.org" target="\_blank">http://slashdot.org</A> ]<A Href="http://slashdot.org" target="\_blank">http://slashdot.org</A>) and Everything2 (<A Href="http://everything2.com" target="\_blank">http://everything2.com</A>).

We will talk more about these communities in the next week of the forum, focusing especially on the ways they can reinforce or erode the traditional equation of one author to one work. But in this context, I think it's interesting to ask under what conditions the communities built by these various "trust metrics" can be works of art in themselves.


/joline