Decentralized Reputation

Decentralized systems are highly dependent on trust within the community.

Developing decentralized reputation systems that build trust and thus enable communities to govern themselves without a central authority.

At the end of this challenge, we will ask ourselves:

Have we succeeded in increasing trust in various decentralized systems?

• Number of applications and systems using a valid reputation model on Cardano
• Trust in decentralized systems
• Satisfaction with decentralized systems
• Size and growth of decentralized communities
• Growth in community advisors participating in Project Catalyst
• Number of proposals that using a reputation model

Reputation systems constitute one of the few work- able mechanisms for distributed applications in which users can be made accountable for their actions. By collecting user experiences in reputation profiles, participants are encouraged to interact more with well-behaving peers hence better online behavior is motivated.

Creating a transparent and comprehensible reputation system that will increase trust in order set the base for growing adoption of Cardano in general through practical use cases - and in Project Catalyst for proposers, voters, (veteran) community advisors.

Why is it important (extended):

Project Catalyst attracts new community members from fund to fund. To grow even more and, equally important, to increase the activity level of all members, it is very important that all roles have some predictability in the outcome of the responsibilities they take on. A proposer relies on Community Advisors (CAs). CAs on Veteran Community Advisors (VCAs) and voters on VCAs. When people trust the dependent role, they are more likely to participate (repeatedly). To fuel the continued development of Project Catalyst, we need to increase the level of trust with a reputation system.

But a reputation system is not only necessary for Project Catalyst, it's crucial for any decentralized or distributed governance system. Therefore, this challenge is created to support ideas, projects and initiatives that help to develop a valid reputation model that can be used for various use cases to build trust among people and systems. 

How success looks like (extended):

• For Cardano:

A functional and valid reputation system will accelerate the adaptation of decentralized systems in voting, governance, economy and society. As part of this challenge, proposals are sought that map and build trust and reputation via decentralized systems on the Cardano Blockchain.

• For Project Catalyst:

Active community members help Cardano grow via Project Catalyst. Entrepreneurs and developers get their proposals funded with the help of trusted (veteran) community advisors and voters. All participants have the feeling of transparency, trust, collaboration, objectivity, community driven decisions, and success.

Cardano and Project Catalyst have a maturing governance model that helps growing participants to take the guided path through the process, learn and improve from one fund to the next one. Quick innovations and iterations help the members to contribute and benefit from its growth in parallel. A growing fund combined with growing trust attracts even more entrepreneurs, developers, investors, advisors and voters to the ecosystem and helps all community members to become successful.

Guiding questions:

• How can we be confident in the outcome of a reviewing and/or voting process?
• How can we exchange based on trust build by recommendation system?
• Do we need to rate each other in order to build trust through reputation?
• Who can vote whom up/down and why?
• How do we collect and weight ratings?
• How can we keep the reputation system effective?
• How can we build a transparent reputation system?
• How can we create sustainable and accurate expectations of future interactions?
• What are the tools that we need to prioritize first?
• How can we motivate users to provide feedback?
• How can we convince users to provide elicit honest feedback?
• How do we avoid fake reputation?
• How do we avoid the risk of pooled-reputation (I vote for you, you for me)?
• What do our community members want, and how do they get it from the Cardano governance model?
• What would make a community member motivated to actively participate in the Catalyst experience?

Potential directions:

• Building prototypes for different use cases and industries: eg. in governance/voting, media, research, etc. 
• Definition of 'metrics' for a reputation system
• Identify ways to vote to build trust and reputation
• Identify ways to comment on 'wrong feedback' and identify fake comments
• Qualitative research
• Quantitative research

Budget explanation:

This challenge supports ideas, projects and initiatives to create various reputation models over the next 6 month. Therefore the budget is set to US$ 250.000 to ensure a sustainable funding for these proposals.