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Principles of Reputation
 Building the open space agenda for day three (click to enlarge) |
Today was an open space day. The more I participate in open space, the more I’m convinced that it’s the right way to do workshops. I wish we’d had two days of open space because the agenda for today was so packed with things I wanted to hear about. The first session I attended was labeled “The Laws of Reputation.” I also wanted to go to Marty Schleiff’s meeting on XRI, but I felt like I had to do the reputation thing.
I don’t know that we got to “laws” as such, but we did get some ideas out that might be useful as principles:
- Reputation is one of the factors upon which trust is based
- Reputation is someone else’s story about me - this means that I can’t control what you say about me although I may be able to affect the factors you based your story on. Also, every person should be able to have their own story about me.
- Reputation exists in the context of community - this is different than saying “communities have a reputation about someone.”
- Reputation is based on identity - reputation, as someone else’s story, isn’t part of your identity, but is based on an identity or set of identities.
- Reputation is a currency - while you can’t change it, reputation can be used as a resource. Paul Resnick has a paper showing the value of a positive eBay reputation.
- Reputation is narrative - you have to apply metaphor to interpret, reputation is dynamic becase the factors that affect it are always changing, reputation may require weaving together of plot lines.
- Reputation is based on claims (verified or not), transactions, ratings, and endorsements. - this brings up the issue of evidence, recourse for slander or mistakes, etc.
- Reputation is muti-level - a reputation isn’t just based on facts, but is also based on other’s beliefs about the target of that reputation. This requires some way of signaling beliefs to others.
- Mutiple people holding the same opinion increases the weight o that opinion - repeat behavior is also another way of weighting reputation.
The participants in this session were: Daniel Lulich, Daniel Perry, Martin Rosvall, Mari Kuraishi, Eric Harris-Braun, Matthew Hochhauser, Daniel Hausermann, Phil Windley, David Evan, Casper Biering, and Niegel Jacob.
Posted by windley on June 21, 2006 9:01 AM
Comment from Fen Labalme
at
June 21, 2006 11:05 PM
Great stuff. You might enjoy the outline at http://openprivacy.org/reputations/
In particular, I think it's important that Reputations are first class objects.
Also, the "Additional reputation links" are, IMO, quite useful reading (even if a half a decade old).
Comment from paolo at June 22, 2006 11:27 AM
I prefer to use the word "trust".
I define trust as a dyadic quantity, it in the subjective opinion of one principal (truster) about another principal (trustee).
I call "reputation" some sort of global average of the trust statements principals expressed.
Google's Pagerank is what I call the "reputation" of a Web page. The link from my site to your site is what I call "trust statements".
1) Trust is subjective.
I would never speak of "mistakes": if I say that the Pope is a bad person, am I making a mistake? No, it depends on my personal opinions and every opinion is possible and equally plausible.
"Reputation is someone else’s story about me". That's the key point. What matters is the direction of the arrow. I can control the links that goes out of my Web page but I CANNOT control the links that comes into my Web page (that was the intuition behind pagerank basically). I can control what I say about other people but I CANNOT control what other people say about me. My reputation should be based only on what other people say about me (arrows entering in me ;-)
I believe that it makes no sense to compute a global value of reputation for you that it is the same for everyone. Keeping with the Web metaphor, it makes no sense to say that "billgates.com" has a global reputation of 9/10 because it has globally many incoming links (global trust metric). It would make much more sense to predict the "trust score" of billgates.com in a personalized way, depending on what I like, so that for instance if I appreciate Stallman and Torvald, this would possibly result in a predicted_trust(Paolo,billgates.com)=1/10 (local trust metric). Otherwise the risk is the Tyranny of the Majority and the standardization of society and the exclusion of different thinkers and black sheep. These subjects are the most important for an evolution of the society (and it is thanks to these figures that we are no more with middle ages values for instance).
I would suggest the great sci-fi (creative commons released) novel: Down and out in the magic Kingdom.
http://www.craphound.com/down/download.php
The author Cory Doctorow calls reputation "whuffie".
Thanks for sharing your points!
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