GATE Trust RATINGS

While the burden of ranking an individual is significant, the ability to rate a single interaction is much less so. GATE Trust Ratings are required for all parties that participate in any business transaction or interaction within the GATE Village. GATE Trust Ratings are themselves subjective appraisals of individuals about individuals; not about them generally but about a specific, single business transaction or interaction. Ratings are one of three possible values for each transaction:

• Untrustworthy: significant portions of an agreement were not performed or not adequately completed resulting in 3^rd party consequences (IE: contract disputes, legal proceedings, insurance claims etc); or falsely and grossly representing capabilities and/or the ability to meet milestones.

• Has Issues: some minor and mostly inconsequential portions of the agreement were late or incomplete but did not have any serious 3^rd party consequences; or mildly falsely representing capabilities and/or the ability to meet milestone(s).

• Trustworthy: all aspects of the business transaction was as expected; all representative capabilities existed sufficiently to meet all milestones; there were no surprises of any kind.

  It is considered an unusual event to see any rating of “Untrustworthy” and a trust investigation is automatically triggered whenever such a rating is entered into the GATE Trust System. GATE Members should be wary of working with other Members that have any rating of “Untrustworthy”, there may be a reasonable excuse (that is why comments and rebuttals are allowed and encouraged) but any “Untrustworthy” rating is a serious red-flag that should not be ignored.

  It is very important to note that these ratings are NOT about capabilities, compentencies, personalities, deliverables, or other descriptions of the actual transaction. This rating is only whether or not all parties could be trusted in their representations at the beginning of and during the transaction itself. If you are expecting guru status but receive little more than general competence, you should probably provide a “Has Issues” even if there were no consequences (that is, even if any client involved was happy), you might have only got lucky in that case.

   

  Ratings Are Not Anonymous

  Anonymous ratings would inevitably lead directly to dishonesty in the ratings themselves and conversely, ratings whereby the rater is known and might be called upon to defend their rating will inevitably lead to a more honest, more trustworthy appraisal.

   

  There is no doubt but that a good GATE Trust Score is as valuable to business as a good Credit Score is to personal finance; that is by design. The desire is to provide an incentive towards trustworthy behaviour because that is the best approach to get a good Trust Score and a good Trust Score is likely to bring in more business. If ratings were anonymous then it would behoove all parties to all business transactions to positively exaggerate their ratings of others with the hope and expectation that the other parties will do the same. As all parties would see their individual Trust Score increase as a result of such exaggeration they would be highly motivated to cheat on the ratings as they will never be called upon to defend them. The result in such a system is chaos, the ratings would be meaningless as they pertain to trust, it being impossible to determine which ratings where honest appraisals and which ones were simple reciprocity.

   

  In GATE's open and transparent rating system all GATE Members (and only GATE Members and GATE Employees) have access to all previous ratings, who provided the rating, who the rating was for, what the actual rating was and any comments from any party that accompanied the rating. In other words, each individual are themselves putting their own reputation on the line with their ratings of others and may be called upon to defend their ratings to others that rely on them (a duty they cannot shirk should it come to them).

   

  While nobody enjoys a negative rating and few actually enjoy providing one, fewer still want to have their reputation sullied by other people. If a person has proven to be somewhat untrustworthy in their dealings with you, they are quite likely to be somewhat untrustworthy with their dealings with others. If I make a decision to work with somebody based upon somebody else's rating and that somebody doesn't prove to match the expected trustworthiness then you can bet I'll be talking with that original rater asking more about the rating. I would expect the same in reverse and therefore I will make my ratings as honest as I can.

   

  Now, it may well be that circumstances are sufficiently different that the rating being relied upon was inappropriate or that circumstances of the individual in question are sufficiently different that their trustworthiness is affected. Or it may be that the parties were trying to game the system, or perhaps that the rater wasn't taking the rating process seriously enough...in any case, if any party remains unsatisfied with the fairness of any rating they may make a GATE Trust Investigation Request.