Whilst it’s probably a stretch too far to suggest we’re living in the free agent nation immortalized by Dan Pink, it’s no doubt true that more people are trading online in a variety of ways, whether as part of the sharing economy or via platforms such as oDesk and GitHub.
A recent study found that far and away the most effective way for such people to find business was via networking. Of course, it’s no longer (has it ever been?) the case of just who you know, but whether those people know, trust and value what you do.
Whilst the old New Yorker cartoon suggested that no one knows you’re a dog on the Internet, the modern social web demands a means of validating trust and reliability. Indeed, Rachel Botsman famously focused her 2012 TED talk on the critical role trust plays in the new economy.
Just over a year ago, this challenge of trust and reputation was regarded as a central reason why the sharing economy would fail to take off in an essay penned by Tom Slee.
He argues that the reputation systems used by peer to peer websites do a poor job of communicating trust, and therefore the information required by people using these sites is not sufficient to make the model sustainable.
