(2003-09-18) Johnson On Opengov

Steven Johnson on OpenGov - Separating the useful from the useless is the tricky part of maintaining a user-authored site. Mc Kinley specifically modeled the Government Information Awareness system after EBay's decentralized approach to commerce, in which users police themselves by rating each other's reliability each time they conduct a transaction with another user... The self-policing of the site makes for an arresting sociological Experiment. Most of the time, the trust ratings (Reputation Management) of eBay manage to block an individual's financial incentive to misrepresent information online. Will a similar approach work when the incentive is ideological instead of financial?