Reputation on social innovation systems: how and why

I introduced the notion of user reputation within the context of social innovation platform via spigit's idea management system about three years ago. Judging by the growing list of competitors that are incorporating reputation in their products, its utility has certainly been validated beyond doubt. In this blog post I want to spend some time on the central idea behind the reputation score and why it is such a critical aspect of a social innovation environment.

What is Reputation Score?
Within a "purpose-built community", reputation score is an number representing the "quality" of user contributions measured against the stated purpose of that community.

I want to stress a few points here. First it should reflect the "quality" of contributions not the "quantity". I have talked to quite a few people and seen implementations that confuse reputation with "virtual currency" or "points". Although we have found a high correlation between active users and high reputation scores in practice, the score must not be computed based on the contribution volume.

The second point is that it should take into account how user is performing with respect to the community goal. For innovation communities this obviously relates to the quality of ideas suggested by a user. The figure below (grossly over-simplified but hopefully gets the point across) shows four factors that can potentially influence the reputation score:

1. Peer Feedback - This perhaps is the most important factor influencing reputation. Peer feedback can be positive or negative. Depending on sponsor's preference, one can include purely social interactions such as making a connection or providing a testimonial, or take into account goal-driven interaction such as voting patterns or topical conversations.
2. Achievements - User accomplishments in the context of the community goal is also an important factor. In social innovation system, it can be tied to the quality of ideas posted by a user as reflected by the stage advancement or acceptance ratio.
   
3. Predictive Ability - At Spigit, we preach the value of involving the community, not just for idea collection, but for collaborative evaluation and selection of ideas. An individual's ability to spot good ideas early in their life-cycle is very important function of the system and therefore should be considered in reputation score calculations.
4. Designated Status - This is similar to the notion of designating certain Web sites as "trusted" in certain web page ranking algorithms. Organizations always have certain individuals that have an "off-line reputation". Even if this does not automatically assign a higher score to a person, it can be factored in to control the degree of influence the person has on reputation of other users s/he interacts with.

Finally, the reputation score is really not a single number. Reputation scores can be attached to different segments of user contributions such as pre-defined categories, tags, ontological subjects, etc.

Putting Reputation Score to Use
Reputation score has three important uses. First it is a tool for bubbling up community leaders. Second, it can be leveraged to manage online behavior of community members, both positively and negatively. Third, it helps add relevance to idea ranking and reduces effect of gaming/clique behaviors.

Identify Emergent Leaders
A well designed Enterprise 2.0 platform must help in recognizing good ideas and good people. Reputation scores help identify "natural" leaders in the community as opposed to the "designated" leaders identified based on their position within the organization. Users that earn high reputation provide direct value via their knowledgeable contributions. They can also become part of community governance process. Community sponsors can rely on such users to channel user input in the right direction and spreading the word about new initiatives and ideas.

Reputation as a positive motivator
I discussed different types of motivations in another blog post. Reputation scores can be used as a powerful motivator directly and indirectly. Depending on the culture of the organization, being on the reputation leaderboard can be a source of peer recognition and bring out individual competition. We have seen this happen in communities that have a high percentage of knowledge workers. Some of Spigit's customers are also making this a basis for recognition by the leadership.

Inhibit spamming/gaming behaviors
This is one of the less known and less understood use of reputation score. A good reputation system should have the ability to detect behaviors that add little value to the community and correspond to spam-like content or deliberate attempts at gaming the system. For internal facing communities, such behaviors are rare (less than 0.5% of total user population). I have seen some external communities where the spam has drowned out legitimate content. These "bad apples" (as I fondly call them within Spigit platform) have to be detected and their reputation score and points need to be adjusted accordingly.