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Social Capital as Engagement and Belief Revision

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Social Informatics (SocInfo 2020)

Abstract

Social Capital or “goodwill” is an essential ingredient of any collective activity – be it commercial, cultural or administrative activity. In online environments, several models have been pursued for recording and utilizing social capital based on signals including likes or upvotes. Such explicitly stated signals are susceptible to impulsive behavior and hyperinflation. In this paper, we develop an implicit model for social capital based on the extent of engagement generated by any participant’s activities, and the way this engagement leads to a belief revision about the participant from other members of the community. Two kinds of social capital measures are proposed: an authority score that indicates engagement, and a citizenship score that calibrates value-addition made by a user as a result of engaging with others’ content. The proposed model is implemented in two online communities showing different kinds of content authorities, supported by a strong community of engaged citizens.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://goodwill.zense.co.in.

  2. 2.

    https://circuitverse.org/.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Prof. Sridhar Mandyam K (IIIT Bangalore) for his help and work on Belief revision model; Dr. Prasad Ram (Gooru) whose work inspired AR and CR metrics; Anshumaan Agrawal (IIIT Bangalore) for countless fruitful discussions and Satvik Ramaprasad (CircuitVerse) for providing data from CircuitVerse.

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Correspondence to Srinath Srinivasa .

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A Appendix: Algorithm for Computing Authority and Citizen Ranks

A Appendix: Algorithm for Computing Authority and Citizen Ranks

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Koley, G., Deshmukh, J., Srinivasa, S. (2020). Social Capital as Engagement and Belief Revision. In: Aref, S., et al. Social Informatics. SocInfo 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12467. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60975-7_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60975-7_11

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