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Henri Poole of Affero On Online Trust
Henri Poole writes "In the interview 'Trust Unlimited', Robert McMillan at LinuxPlanet asks Poole about the roots, current developments, and future of Affero's trust and commerce system. Poole talks about his work at the Well, Mandrakesoft's e-services initiative, and current work with LinuxQuestions, and covers topics of transportable reputations, gaming, profits, blogs, forums, independent media and the importance of independent perspectives and decentralized trust metrics in a democratic society."
From the affero webpage Simply register and you are assigned a unique web address (URL). Once you attach this URL to your digital content, others can recognize you with reputation points and or financial contributions.
What about the reverse , can I get money , for my reputation?
Then I'll encash all my Karma before this post gets modded down and destroys it all.....
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
Does this make him a meta-karmawhore?
With searching of google newsgroups, and forums, I can finally say thanks for someones post who fixed my problem, even if the post was months/years old.
Now, how about we add this to Slashcode! This is moderation on a whole new level. Very cool idea.
If you feel you're worth it, you can get listed as a person.organising to donate to. Then people can give *you* money if they appreciate your work.
So it's particularly useful for projects that need a small cash stream to keep going, and for developers that would like to do more Free Software work, but don't have the money/time to do so.
This all sounds interesting. However what would be really useful is a way to translate this to a resume. The number of years in a certain language does not really translate well to being a good fit for a position. If working on open source projects and building a lot of OS Karma would help people get jobs then you would see a big rise in the quality and effort of open source projects.
Visit Savagenumber.com
Sounds like a project I worked on a while back. Except mine automatically gave a negative rating to anyone that claimed to be able to objectively rate every Internet user on the planet.
Seriously though, who would pay any attention to something like this? Are there actually people out there that care if Joe from Texas gave them X for their "Internet rating?"
Not to mention, if you haven't noticed that every community that uses a publically displayed "experience points" type system slowly dies a redundant, boring death as people continually spit out the same useless advice as fast as possible to receive their precious points. It seems to attract the bottom of the barrel, perhaps because people who are truly interested in the discussion don't need the "incentive" and go to serious forums.
So what's to stop someone from assuming your identity and ruining your reputation? It seems this alone invalidates the system.
Doesn't it seem a bit too generic? I mean he assumes that having a good reputation in one community should translate directly into a good reputation in another community, which is often not the case.
For example, does having excellent karma in slashdot qualify you to be an authority on the linux kernel mailing list? Taking a real world example, if you were popular among all your neo-nazi friend for your strong political convictions, and you suddenly moved to israel, would/should you enjoy the same good reputation as in your previous home?
I think for this to be any use, each community would have to choose to accept and rate points from any other community. If I have X points from community A, community B might rate me as X*3, while community C rates me as X*-2 because it doesn't like community A, and community D rates me as zero, because it has never heard of community A.
Even then, there will obviously be opportunities for canny folk to abuse the system, and gain credits they don't deserve. A bit like politics really.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Apparently not a very good one. Most all active WELL users are still interfacing through an ~15+ year old command line toolset.
As the former CEO oif Mandrakesoft I cant take his article seriously. In the early stages of the linux community we saw a few well supported bleeding edge distros with focused objectives of what they wanted to accomplish. later linux boomed, and the big distros ate the smaller ones, then became complacent and generalized. Now (In the aftermath of the bursted bubble) we see an rampant growth in little, focused, and well supported distros,(www.distrowatch.com) while the lumbering giants beg for money, or try to sell us "Services". The Outgoing "linux execs" never had a clue, they dont understand that opensource will not evolve into corprate grey. Its a grassroots thing, always has been, always will be. Its powerful because of that. Henri was a leader amongst sellouts, so he is modded into /dev/null
I recommend reading the following two papers on The Solar Trust Model, a distributed trust model that can be used by anyone to compute relative trust of anyone else, regardless of prior relationships or context.
c li fford.pdf
The Solar Trust Model: Authentication without Limitation at:
http://www.acsac.org/1998/abstracts/fri-a-1030-
Networking in The Solar Trust Model:
Determining Optimal Trust Paths in a Decentralized Trust Network at http://www.acsac.org/2002/papers/9.pdf
From the second paper's abstract:
The Solar Trust Model provides a method by which the sender of a message can be authenticated, and the level of trust that can be placed in the sender of the message or the message itself can be computed. The model works even if there is no prior relationship between the sender and receiver of the message. The Solar Trust Model overcomes a variety of limitations inherent in the design of other trust models and public key infrastructures. This paper presents a variety of enhancements and formalizations to the basic concepts of the model. In addition, this paper provides a set of algorithms that can be used to determine all of the possible trusted paths along which a message can be sent from a sender to recipient and the optimal choice of paths from a selection of paths. The paper also presents algorithms for reducing the network load produced by the model through piggybacking, path caching, and load distribution techniques.
The way I look at affero is that it is another way that 1 systeem keeps track of your identity. The same as microsoft is doing with hotmail/msn. But affero doesn't use it to proof who you are for transactions. Instead it proofs your credibility as someone who adds to a community. With an added posibility to get donations because you are such a swell guy. It would be nice if we could combine this stuff.
I mean it's easy if you don't have to log on everywhere and it's great to be or feel appreciated for your effort in forums/irc/etc..
Long live the Speaker Bracelet
Rolo D. Monkey
Human trust or reputation is usually developed one-and-one and in personal interactions. It is a _little bit_ transitive (A trusts B, B trusts C, therefore A trusts C) but there are many interesting exceptions. It is a _little bit_ like an incrementally adjusted "score" in a long term game, but again, there are many interesting exceptions where it changes with the wind. Trust and reputation, in their human sense, are mysteries.
A database about "trust" or "reputation" based on voting is something completely different. It has little or nothing in common with the human forms. It can not "change with the wind". Worse than being strictly transitive, it's a popularity contest (A "trusts" anonymous crowds of voters; an anonymous crowd of voters "trusts" C; therefore A "trusts" C). That's not trust -- that's an election for homecoming king and queen in a cliquish high school.
In short, systems such as Affero smack of an unscientific sociological experiment to redefine what trust and reputation mean. Worse, given its proposed connection to money and careers -- it's an experiment that, if it succeeds, forces everyone in the free software industry to play. In short, it is immoral.
(This isn't to say that it's fundamentally different from, say, HR blacklists and other private realizations of similar ideas.)
One of the key "properties" that Affero possesses is a _great_ thing: the paylist mechanism. You can make a list of people or organizations and describe how they "divide up a pie" -- and people can, in a single transaction, pay all the members of that list according to the proportions. That's a (potentially) incredibly useful tool. Think of it as "group paypal". For example, a software project or a group of musicians can use that to organize an on-line tip-jar without the hassles and legal overhead of forming a formal organization.
So, Affero, _please_ drop this obnoxious, culture-polluting notion of formalized "trust" and "reputation", surface the paylist mechanism, and let us use that as we see fit. We'll use _real_ trust and _real_ reputation to negotiate among ourselves how to structure the paylists.
Meanwhile: we really _do not need_ a monetized, playground popularity contest.
-t
Trust can extend itself as long as it's trusted to.
The nice thing about Affero is that it is flexible. Slashdot's Karma/Moderation/Meta-Moderation system captures some excellent ideas. All of them can be expressed in terms of Affero and shouldn't be overlooked.
Another way of looking at it is simply the usual networking transaction that take place in the real world. Imagine that you are looking for a reliable contractor to renovate your house. There are a number of three-way transactions taking place between you, a friend you trust, and a contractor he trusts well enough to recommend. The whole point of reputation and networking is to allow a certain amount of transitivity in trust relationships.
A trusts B's judgement. B trusts the quality of C's work. B recommends C to A. If the final transaction works out well, then A's trust in B's judgement is reinforced and A comes to trust C's work directly. C gets more business out of it.
In the open source community there is an inner circle of people with large reputations. Most of them have substantial time commitments already. But most of them, by virtue of their widespread contact with the OS community have had an opportunity to meet and interact with a large number of other people. They may not have the time or interest to do a project for me, even if I can pay. However, they probably know people who would do a good job.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.