Bonik Somiti: A Social-market Tool for Safe, Accountable, and Harmonious Informal E-Market Ecosystem in Bangladesh

2026-02-13

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Responsible Web: Social and technical mechanisms of refusal for web technologies and applications
• Social Networks and Social Media: Analysis of web-mediated communications, communities, and crowds

Abstract

People in informal e-markets often try to deal with fraud and financial harm by sharing posts, screenshots, and warnings in social media groups. However, buyers and sellers frequently face further problems because these reports are scattered, hard to verify, and rarely lead to resolution. We studied these issues through a survey with 124 participants and interviews with 36 buyers, sellers, and related stakeholders from Bangladesh and designed Bonik Somiti, a socio-technical system that supports structured reporting, admin-led mediation, and accountability in informal e-markets. Our evaluation with 32 participants revealed several challenges in managing fraud, resolving disputes, and building trust within existing informal practices and the assumptions behind them. Based on these findings, we further discuss how community-centered technologies can be designed to support safer and more accountable informal e-markets in the Global South.

Problem

• informal e-markets
• fraud
• dispute resolution
• trust
• accountability

Innovation

• socio-technical system
• structured reporting
• community-centered design
• informal e-markets
• accountability