An Experimental Approach to Reputation in E-Participation

Abstract

E-participation is about ICT-supported participation of citizens in democratic processes and procedures (e.g., consultation or co-creation). Research has mostly centered on the development of tools to model and deploy ICT-supported democratic processes. So far, the integration and use of reputation has only been rarely considered even tough reputation systems provide ratings that could be adapted well to the context of e-participation e.g., evaluating and rating comments and activities of users. Furthermore, reputation in e-participation can increase the trust between users (e.g., new participants) and their activities e.g., commenting or rating. In this paper, we aim to address reputation in e-participation with an overview of state of the art and an experimental reputation model for e-participation. The model measures not only the quality of comments but also the activity of users. Thereby, a certain level of assurance is enabled by users itself; they can mark unqualified posts that can be removed at a certain level. For future work, we aim to perform user acceptance tests in order to identify potential chances and pitfalls and further enhance the proposed solution.