Digital trust is the cornerstone of collaborative initiatives on the internet.
Digital trust is a disruptive phenomenon: it represents a before and after in how people interact when they exchange common interests, goods or services, without the need for a traditional intermediary.
The expert of the Future Trends Forum, Javier Creus, distinguishes, within digital trust, three types of trust:
1.- Trust in open content.
2. Trust between peers, or trust in collaborative platforms. Click here to learn more.
3.- Trust in blockchain. Click here to learn more.
In this article, we focus on trust in open content. We are referring to systems, platforms or solutions where citizens collaborate selflessly, in a virtual community, contributing their knowledge or their creations under what are called free content, or copyleft.
Within this category we find cyberactivism, online volunteering, and all kinds of wikis (a word of Hawaiian origin that means “fast”).
Open content systems are characterized by bringing together citizens who want to contribute their knowledge and experiences so that other citizens can benefit. We can say that they are systems that pursue the common good of the community that is part of them. As examples, in addition to the aforementioned Wikipedia, we can cite Change.org, Citizendium, or DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), an independent database that contains more than 15,000 peer-reviewed open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts, and humanities.
How does trust work in this type of system? Below, we highlight the most important features:
- Goodwill is assumed. The key pillar of trust in this type of system is that it is based on the principle that a comfortable majority of contributors to the system have good will. Presuming good faith is a fundamental principle of any wiki. “If anyone is allowed to edit, it is precisely because most of the people who edit are supposed to do so in order to contribute to the project, and not with the intention of harming it. If this were not true, a project like Wikipedia would be doomed to fail.”
- Fair play is encouraged. In these systems, “etiquette” principles must be complied with, which establish the way to behave with other users. A key to active participation is to accept mistakes: Active users are confident that they can be useful, because mistakes are not blamed on them, and there are mechanisms to correct them.
- Power of inclusion. One of the key aspects of open content is its power of inclusion: anyone from anywhere in the world can collaborate in order to contribute to the cause in question. This encourages groups that may feel isolated or excluded in the physical world to feel accompanied in this type of virtual communities, increasing their confidence as a group.
- Personal copyright management: User input is encouraged through Creative Commons, which aims to build a richer public domain by providing an alternative to “all rights reserved” copyright, leaving authors the freedom to choose the terms and conditions of licensing their works.
- Collegiate supervision. A fundamental piece of trust is in advanced users, who act as moderators and are ultimately able to veto a user or content because they consider it vandalism or contrary to the established rules of coexistence. In the case of Wikipedia, they are the so-called librarians, who are elected by vote of the user community on their merits. To get an idea, there are currently 67 librarians on the Spanish Wikipedia (one in every 92,250 users and one in every 260 active users is a librarian).
- There are supra-organizations that bring together the different initiatives: The different open content initiatives are in permanent communication and collaboration with each other, reinforcing the policies and rules of operation of open content sites, creating systemic trust. An example of this type of organization is The Creative Commons Global Network.
To get an idea of the importance of this type of trust, Wikipedia is the fifth most visited website in the world, behind only Google, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter.
