Towards a framework for cyber social status based trusted open collaboration

Collaboration takes place in both closed and open environments. While closed collaboration focuses on information or resource sharing amongst selected participants, open collaboration assumes and emphasizes that anyone can participate. In open collaboration, although participation is open to anyone who wishes to contribute or observe, it does not follow that everyone participates on an equal footing. Open collaboration is inherently a social activity. Establishment of trust in this context inevitably requires some form of social computing. Our premise is that such social computing derived trust requires a discriminative approach by utilizing cyber social status so as to enable selective and weighted trustworthiness of users and their activities and resources. In this paper we identify and discuss various kinds of cyber social status that can be used to facilitate trust in open collaboration. More specifically, we focus on social activity-based social status creation and management and articulate how these cyber social statuses of participants and resource can be generated. Furthermore, we show how these cyber social statuses are used in real world open collaboration systems such as Amazon, YouTube and eBay.