Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
5.7 Some Applications of the Trust by Meta-Communication
5.7.1 A Trust Rating System for the Job-Hunting System
for IT-Engineers
As an example of our proposal, we constructed a job-hunting system for IT
engineers as a Facebook application. IT engineers tend to publish their results of
activity as web content. Examples of such web content include, source code
repositories of open source software and its documents, shared slides of technical
meetings, blogs of technical information and logs of technical meetings. If the
personal web contents of an IT engineer are integrated to form one distinguishable
name, we can use the integrated content as evidence of the ability of the IT
engineer. An employer who wants to search for an IT engineer of some specialized
area of technology can easily classify the candidates by the integrated web content
of the candidate.
5.7.2 Mutual Evaluation Among IT Engineers and Its Motivation
Like an IT engineer in the same field, who has the ability to evaluate the skill of
another, there exists a symmetrical relationship between the objective IT engineer
and his/her evaluator. An evaluator also evaluated by the employees and reputation
as an evaluator is accumulated as an ability of the IT engineer. This is the motiva-
tion for the evaluator to be honest (Fig.
5.7
).
5.7.3 Meta-communication Using a Loyalty Program
The primary purpose of a loyalty program is to give customers an incentive to
use same service. A loyalty program has another effect on customers. It is the index
used to evaluate the customer as “loyal customer”. A loyalty program has pseudo-
bidirectionality, from customers to the service, and from the service to the
customers. That is, a customer uses points as a method for settlement and the service
issues points to the user. Issuing points to a user is a kind of meta-communication
which means “you are our royal customer”. The customer who gave points will feel
a sense of superiority in being a loyal customer. It is also an another commitment.
The meaning of meta-communication is not limited to trust. However, almost all
meanings have similar structure. To expand the usage of loyalty programs we can
expand the meaning of meta-communication.
