A trust metric for online virtual teams and work groups

Abstract

Online virtual teams publish their particulars on the Internet for collaborators and other stakeholders to make use of their services. It’s usual that the stakeholders need to judge the level of trust they can put on a service provider before signing up an association. The process of building a dependent association with an Internet community suffers from usual drawbacks such as lack of proximity, anonymity, misrepresentation, proxy/masquerading, etc. Research of online cyber community and social networking, addresses some of these problems. These teams might be required to register with government agencies to add trust about their existence and functioning but stakeholders are usually in search of methods to verify trust on their own before availing services. This chapter introduces the concept of trust of online virtual teams and quantifies it. The subsequent sections define trust and identify its attributes and properties. They provide methods to quantify each attribute and finally, propose a metric for trust.