Official URL: http://www.nuim.ie/nirsa/research/documents/WP40_D...

In this paper we lay some theoretical foundations for examining governance, users and trust in online environments. Trust has been a central concern in the social sciences since, at least, the pioneering work of Georg Simmel's “The Philosophy of Money”, in which the author described trust as fundamental for the integration of the society. Later sociologists – like Niklas Luhmann and Anthony Giddens -, have attended to the problem of trust, clearly relating the concept to the issue of “risk in modern societies”. The goal of this paper is not to provide an exhaustive survey of 3 the sociological literature in this area but rather to begin to explore different disciplinary conceptions of trust. The PRTLI funded project from which this paper has emerged is an interdisciplinary team of mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers, designers and sociologists and it emerged early on that people had different understandings of the key challenges facing the internet, particularly as they related to security and trust. Of particular concern to the authors is the extent to which we can delegate security maintenance and governance to technology, what decisions get coded into these solutions and what the implications might be for end users.