Inducing Human Cooperation in Decentralized Networks

Abstract

In June 2004 the Freehand I-Share' project started. It was a Dutch project joined by TUDelft, TU Eindhoven, University of Twente, VU Amsterdam, and Philips Research. Its synopsis was "Sharing resources in virtual communities for storage, communication, and processing of multimedia data." Virtual communities were defined as "(virtually bounded) groups of nodes that are willing to share resources and help each other for the benefit of individual and system performance". Industrial Design Engineering was asked to contribute to the project by researching trust and willingness to share in virtual communities. It would do so with a research-through-design approach2. The request for contribution came rather directly from technology itself, with questions being raised about trust and distributed trust management. Already at the beginning of the project it was common notion that techniques for preserving security only make sense to the user if the virtual communities are experienced as trustworthy. No matter what mechanisms are built to establish a secure and trustworthy system from a technical point of view, the user is still a person who could perceive a system differently, and decide to stop using the system altogether. For a positive experience, the options and information presented have to have meaning to the users and should be presented in a transparent way. My commitment to the project as a PhD happened almost naturally. I had been involved in projects similar in their approach to that in I-Share: visualizing transparent solutions to complex, technical problems. I thoroughly enjoyed being the bridging component between technology and users, research and design, theory and practice. Therefore, I felt inspired and at home vnth. the I-Share project. Initially, research questions focused on the relation between (interpersonal) trust and the willingness to cooperate in decentralized networks. However, I soon realized this was a relation I could not directly test in my project without learning about constructs of the willingness to cooperate (trust is only one aspect of it). Therefore, the research was rerouted to investigating ways to induce users of large, decentralized networks to cooperate.