On reputation evaluation in 2.0 communities.

Current technology has disappointed many members of WEB2.0 communities by its slow and tough adaptability to specific usersʼ skills and competences. Most of the largest WEB2.0 communities rely on the work of their members to create the resources they are built on, a business model known under the acronym UGC (User Generated Contents), which is today very popular yet still very simple and immature. Presently the vast majority of the communities that relay on UGCs lack an accurate ranking system for their most proficient members and almost none of them provide an effective rewarding mechanism. Sometimes they do provide means to cooperatively evaluate and classify the available resources, but very few of these mechanisms take in account the competence of the voters. Although rough, the current technology seems sufficient to confer to some cooperative web communities a discrete success, which for the most part is due to their core-members passion and commitment. Unfortunately deficiencies like the ones described can involve that, over time, only a small amount of the members keep committed and willing to produce resources of a certain quality. This tendency leads to the situation in which, although the community grows in terms of numbers, in proportion its value decreases. Considering the fast diffusion of web2.0 communities and the new emerging Enterprise2.0 communities phenomena, this problem needs no longer to be underestimated. 2.0 communities should start thinking about new means to raise their quality standards in order to stay effective and successful over time. Providing communities with concrete rewarding systems like remunerative ones could fix the problem, nevertheless this approach rarely and loosely has been implemented so far. The reason is that the task involves several and not trivial side problems, such as the necessity of an advanced ranking mechanisms to evaluate the members. This method should be able to consider complex factors like competence and commitment, but at the same time it should be easily understandable and shared by the members of the community. In order to make sure that the members share and agree with the rating system it must involve their collaboration, which is a non trivial problem, especially in Entrprise2.0 communities. For the aforementioned reasons I propose as a means to overcome the problem a method based on reputation rather than competence and commitment, which is named Reputation Community Evaluation (RCE). This new approach is not based solely on quantitative measurements but relies on an algorithm which exploits the community member reputations to evaluate the resources and the members themselves. In this method the reputation of the single member grows or decreases according to its activity in the community and the evaluations received from the other members over a certain period of time. All members opinions/votes are themselves weighted accordingly to the single member reputation. This approach makes possible to put in place new kinds of business models, which aim to use users reputations as a digital currency inside Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 communities.