
The following is an excerpt from Chapter 6: Prioritizing Trustworthiness in the book Holy War for True Democracy.
All of the above work will be visible to the world in the form of a tiny icon (as small as 16px square).
Because this chapter is long and dense, I will repeat the five bullets first listed in “Trustworthy Internet Identities” above that summarize this chapter:
- Collect trustworthiness reviews and rating scores from the public and store them in the cloud with full transparency on every aspect of its operations
- Compute two numeric values for each Internet ID (person or organization): an average trustworthiness rating and a confidence value on that rating
- Generate a small icon that conveys at a glance the trustworthiness of a particular individual or organization
- Work with the media to show the trustworthiness icon next to the byline of news articles so that readers can see at a glance the trustworthiness of the author (person or organization)
- Promote the service so that its use is widespread, and thereby pressure government, politicians, the media and pundits to be more honest in their communications
The instructions to the icon designer:
- The icon will be server-generated dynamically, with different icons generated for each different instance
- The icon should have one visual aspect that is recognizable as the DG trustworthiness symbol
- The icon should have one visual aspect that conveys a range of trustworthiness values, such as a color gradient from brown (extremely untrustworthy) to green (extremely trustworthy)
- The icon should have one visual aspect that conveys a range of confidence values, such as a color gradient from black (extremely unconfident) to white (extremely confident)
- The icon should be scalable from 16px square to any larger size and be renderable on modern Web browsers