The Reinvention of Social Capital for Socio-Technical Systems

Emerging ICT should be used to fundamentally rethink, reinvent or rediscover forms of social capital, as a precursor to restoring trust and empowering people for collective action. Four examples of systems that represent and reason with social capital in computational form are forgiveness in e-commerce, legitimate claims for fair resource allocation in open networks, demand-side self-organization in SmartGrids, and affective conditioning for self-regulation in open plan offices. Most of the formal representations of trust concentrate on narrowing the margin of error in the trust decision. In human society, there is a psychological mechanism used in such situations, forgiveness. This can be defined as the complement of trust, being the willingness to restore a system to a homeostatic equilibrium. Legitimate claims is a commonplace occurrence, in open distributed computer systems and networks, for a set of autonomous components to have to pool their resources so that as a group they can achieve collective outcomes that they could not achieve acting individually.