Can anyone provide links to literature or projects whose goals are to build, maintain, or support trust? Or to be less vague, I'm interested in learning about protocols or models that deal with reputation scores, rewards and punishments etc. for networks or groups.

Various crypto projects fundamentally deal with proving X and their networks comprise of entities that are rewarded or punished for either fair, deceptive, or erroneous actions... so maybe some kind of consolidated info about that "grouping" of information would be a good place for me to start. I am curious about learning more about these concepts insofar as how they can apply to situations like this (OSS or community-based contributions towards a shared goal or a shared ecosystem of behaviours or tasks) where various entities (people, organisations, NOT agents/bots) with longitudinal reputation/state coordinate or interact.

I hope I'm making sense...

https://github.com/mitchellh/vouch

Like a cryptographic "vouch/trust" chain? I trust you, you trust someone else, then I at least know there's a second order of connection/trust.

I haven't seen one yet that fundamentally worked. Even before crypto, you had things like reddit karma or upvoting on digg or whatever else. However in the end those still boil down to a social or techno-social "contract"/system. I've not yet seen any system that manages to boil that down to some objective metric, and also still work.