The aim of the project is to study the forms of on-line social interactions, focussing on the analysis of mechanisms that allow the construction of a virtual community.
The project is based on a web-portal formerly developed by Irst- ITC in collaboration with the association “Karadar”. The portal hosts a huge database of mp3 classical music files. These files can be downloaded by the visitors of the site, since there are no copyritght restrictions on them (all tracks are older than 70 years).
So far, 150.000 people from all around the world have registered to the portal (named CoCoA - Compilations Compiler Advisor) and have downloaded files. The interesting point is that many people have started commentig the tracks and leaving messages and suggestions for other users. In other terms, a micro-community of people who love classical music is growing up.
The “Wit, Trust and Reputation” project aims at facilating the growth of this community, in order to study the factors that characterize this peculiar form of social interaction. The project has three main phases:
a) a technical revision and upgrade of the site, with the creation of new spaces and tools for the interactions of users
b) the sustain to the process of generation of the community of users, through forum, blogs and other forms of contact between researchers and users
c) the analysis of data gathered in the previous steps.

Researchers: Antonio Strati, Paolo Rossi, Vincenzo D’Andrea, Paolo Massa, Rossana Dalmonte, Marco Russo
Period: December 2005 – June 2006
Funding: Departments of Information and Communication Technology and of Philological and Historical Sciences of the University of Trento

Italian version (16KB)