Reputation Economy conference at Yale, Dec 8
Eddan writes:
Link (Thanks, Eddan!)The Information Society Project at Yale Law School is proud to present Reputation Economies in Cyberspace. The symposium will be held on December 8, 2007 at Yale Law School in New Haven, CT.
This event will bring together representatives from industry, government, and academia to explore themes in online reputation, community-mediated information production, and their implications for democracy and innovation. The symposium is made possible by the generous support of the Microsoft Corporation.
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The line-up for the conference looks really good. Many very smart people.
To me, any fair reputation system online has to let people inspect the data the system has on them. We can't let black box reputation ratings like FICO credit scores be our model for online reputation systems. We have to know what data the system has on us, and how it's being crunched.
Moreover, the only way to advance real competition among platforms is to give people a right to exit--which necessarily involves the right to transfer information that's been generated regarding their online life.
...which necessarily involves the right to transfer information that's been generated regarding their online life.
Talk of interoperability? Not bloody likely at a Microsoft-funded conference...
I know that reputation is a big deal, especially online because there is often little point of reference for people who are looking for credible information. However, if any companies or corporations push a 'reputation' system, especially one like Google,... you can forget about anonymity. If everyone is put into a role where they have to play politics to 'belong', you effectively destroy what makes the Internet great. I know people feel comfortable when the online experience is a virtual copy of real life, but maybe we should shy away from this "future". It's bad news for everyone when you can't escape reality, if only for a short while.
That has to be the busiest logo in history!
When I think of online reputation systems, I think of the web of trust model that PGP uses - a completely decentralized system based on a universal standard which basically allows people to vouch for each other by signing each other's encryption keys.
Currently, PGP uses the web of trust to rate how likely someone is to be who they claim to be, but it could be applied to all sorts of other areas.
With systems like this, all the data is transparent because it can be simultaneously hosted by multiple independent organizations - 'keyservers' in the current implementation. And it's protected from corruption because nobody can control more than their own signature and key - there's no technical possibility for one organization to distort or control the ratings.
Re: internet anonymity, web-of-trust based identity is the best system to protect anonymity, because it doesn't require any information about a person's real, legal identity or offline persona to work. If I and a bunch of other people trust you online as "revolution", then "revolution" has a good reputation, and other people will trust your crypto key even though they don't know who you "really" are!