From Interaction Scenarios to Representations of Trust

To capture or represent the formation of situated interpersonal trust in online partnerships, the specification includes an "interaction" or conferencing layer, where partners engage in structured dialogues about the "focal points" of trust in a given project. These are the basis of judgements about trustworthiness. Our ideas on the "focal points" of trust have been endorsed by the project's practitioner partners and they are consistent with the research that is described in our section on "swift" and "situated" trust. We have thus focused on structured planning interactions as a source of representation. We believe that specific dialogues targeted at a particular project can reveal potential problem areas, areas where the trust is vulnerable and may need to be nurtured. Potential partners are thus alerted to, and can work around, disagreements and areas of potential difficulty and make tradeoffs between different aspects of compatibility and confidence in any given case. On the basis of discussion with our key informants, and on the empirical findings of research work that is described above, compatibility and confidence have been selected as critical "focal areas" of trust in our specification. Each of these areas has been subdivided into "focal points," or attributes. These are contingent on the objectives and demands of any specific project: membership of partnerships is subject to change, people and technologies develop over time, and the motivations for participating will differ across projects. A firm may undertake one project because they need the money, a second project because they wish to "coat-tail" on the reputation of another partner, and a third because it offers an opportunity to showcase a unique area of expertise.