A dynamic and flexible representation of social relationships in CSCW

Abstract

CSCW system designers lack effective support in addressing the social issues and interpersonal relationships which are linked with the use of CSCW systems. We present a formal description of trust to support CSCW system designers in considering the social aspects of group work, embedding those considerations in systems and analysing computer supported group processes. We argue that trust is a critical aspect in group work, and describe what we consider to be the building blocks of trust. We then present a formal notation for the building blocks, their use in reasoning about social interactions and how they are amended over time. We then consider how the formalism may be used in practice, and present some insights from initial analysis of the behaviour of the formalism. This is followed by a description of possible amendments and extensions to the formalism. We conclude that it is possible to formalise a notion of trust and to model the formalisation by a computational mechanism.