design from trust

A design approach which depends on good-faith actors while still guarding against bad faith actors, often with good-faith actors’ help. Examples of systems designed from trust are Wikipedia and open-source software. Jerry Michalski has a short video on designing systems with trust, and his website What if We Trusted You delves deeper into the approach.

While not universally applicable, design from trust asks whether the cost of policing bad actors is worth the benefit to the community, and whether those resources would provide more benefit supporting the community directly. I think it relates to harm reduction.

Why design from trust?

Many systems are designed from mistrust, and suffer for it. For example:

• The educational system’s focus on standardized testing was designed out of mistrust of students’ ability to learn and teachers’ ability to teach. It’s forced teachers to “teach the test” in a one-size-fits-all way to students rather than focusing on what and how students actually want to learn.
• Means-testing of government assistance programs is a barrier to their effectiveness and consumes administrative resources that could better be put toward the purpose of the programs themselves.

Values of Designing from Trust

• Cooperation over coercion
• Bad actors last rather than first
• Optimizes for thriving communities rather than efficiency and scale
• interdependence over individualism
• Community over control

Dealing with bad actors

Design from trust doesn’t mean naively trusting everyone, but through its valuing community and cooperation it tends to rely on the abundance of good actors to neutralize bad ones. While Wikipedia for example is frequently vandalized, such vandalism is typically caught and corrected promptly by moderators or automated moderation tools created by community members. And while open-sourcing code can in theory allow hackers to find and exploit vulnerabilities, it’s more likely that vulnerabilities are found and fixed first by community members who vastly outnumber malicious actors.

Further Reading

• “Business Lessons From the Donut and Coffee Guy”, about the myriad benefits reaped by a shopkeeper who trusts his customers to make their own change. Key: “when you get down to it, you can’t market trust…it needs to be earned. People trust you when you trust them.”