Meoh Trust Project

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= independent research group located in Brussels: Its main topic of interest is trust

URL = http://meoh.community/

Description

via Gael Van Weyenbergh:

"MEOH

Meoh is an independent research group located in the heart of Brussels. Its main topic of interest is trust. At the systemic level, the group conducts a fundamental research on human dynamics, and at the practical level, the group aims to apply the insights of its research to product development.


WHY

In a highly connected, complex and uncertain world, we lose all ability to predict the future. Therefore we must design for adaptability. We believe this is also true for social systems. Indeed, connectedness creates complexity and complexity bring uncertainty as events do not have their sources in easily identifiable causes anymore, but in a web of intricate relationships that mutually influence each other. As a result, we must somehow rely on trust as a fundamental element of social relationships as we are now entering in uncharted territory. Therefore, in order for social systems to adapt to the new situation, there is a need to add a capacity for resilience on one hand, as well as a need to open new channels for social interactions based on trust on the other hand. As the viability of social systems depends on their capacity to adapt to the evolving social environment, this supposes to initiate a paradigm shift from efficacy to optimality, and from control to synergy.


HOW

We propose complexity theory as a way to tackle the challenge of adaptability in human society. Because human society being a complex environment, complexity theory is a legitimate candidate to provide useful insights, and complex systems are naturally optimized for adaptability and flexibility. Therefore we aim to explore how social trust can be understood through the lens of complex systems and be applied to human society as the bedrock for social interactions. Trust being the belief in the benevolence and capability of other people, trusting others is a willingness to enter into a position of dependence and vulnerability toward those who are trusted. Trusting others may yield various results which might range from the experience of negative emotions such as being abused, betrayed and deceived, to the experience of positive ones such as meeting positive outcomes. Trust has therefore at its core two interrelated aspects: risks and opportunities. Trust being a subjective perception, there is no reliable way to reduce trust to objective metrics. Yet, if emotions are irrational by nature, they can produce behaviors that are themselves rational and predictable to some degree.

Complex systems such as ecosystems do not evolve under a top down hierarchy, instead their structure emerge from the dynamics between the micro and macro levels. In human society, we understand these dynamics to be between the individual and the collective. In ecosystems, at the micro level, discrete units systematically avoid friction in favor of the path of least resistance. At the macro level, the state of symbiosis is most of the time prefered over competition as synergistic relationships are less energy consuming. Transposing these dynamics in human society, at the individual level, we assume that people naturally avoid negative emotions in favor of positive ones. At the collective level, we explore how intertwined interests can make free riding systematically less desirable than maintaining synergistic relationships. Indeed, trusted relationships are hard to build, easy to lose with a breach of confidence, and even harder to rebuild due to the memory of past interactions that are distributed in the social ecosystem. Trusted relationships being sometimes a priceless social asset, free riding, though being allowed, comes at the cost of facing the risk to lose credibility and therefore access to valuable social clusters.

The social ecosystem would be made of three core elements: (1) a fractal shape to allow trust to be scaled up through the interconnection of small social clusters without losing its properties, (2) a dynamic and emergent structure made of systematic incentives for people to reach and maintain synergistic behaviors, and (3) self-adaptive networks that dynamically translate the state of synergy among the social ecosystem.


WHAT

The model does translate as a risk-aware recommender system where people engage their credibility toward their peers. This recommender system anchored in qualitative relationships is expected to lead to the formation of transversal knowledge networks operating within, across, and beyond social organizations. It would provide the greatest alignment of human resources in the network that coincide with the highest levels of trustworthiness, while capacity to make and execute decisions is maintained at every level of the fractal’s heterarchy. This general purpose model, inspired by the way complex systems such as ecosystems operate, can be applied to every domain of society and is expected to positively impact social engagement, to foster a more resonant leadership, and to deploy collective intelligence at scale while being more flexible, robust and resilient toward change.


DESIRED OUTPUT

At the research level, and based on complexity theory, we aim to open the discussion for a new organizational model adapted to a fully networked society. Self-organization being a major property of complex systems, we aim to explore how to create the capacity to tackle exponential challenges with exponential solutions as a way to be more responsive to the global risks facing humanity.

At the practical level, we aim to develop a new online environment that systematically promotes qualitative social relationships based on trust, recognition and reciprocity. We further envision the model to become a backbone for further social innovations, from the build up of the commons, to swarm intelligence and collective decision making."