A Sustainable Train of Thought

Even with my recent focus on reputation, I haven’t lost my focus on some of the larger issues I was interested in at the beginning of the year. Those issues are absolutely relevant to reputation, particularly bottom-up change. The thing I like about reputation is the ability for everyone to participate—reputation is derived from the choices we make and our actions. Harnessing that ability for individual action on a broad scale could have huge implications for climate change.

Al Gore has a new movie coming out on May 24, and in a recent interview on Grist.org he had the following to say:

What everyone does agree on is the need for a bottom-up appeal to the American masses rather than a top-down campaign focused on leaders in Washington. “The momentum right now has to come from the grass roots,” Gore says. “I don’t think it’s gonna come from Washington. In fact, I know it won’t come from Washington.”

The difficult question has always been: what will it be that gets everyone excited enough to participate and how can they harness that excitement and engage in the process? I’m not saying that reputation is a panacea, but it certainly has some interesting possibilities as a component in larger solutions.

As per our thesis requirements, here are my files:

[updated] DCAlmanaccoArchive.zip (666 KB)

Dave Chiu – Thesis Report.pdf (58.19 MB)

Although I do not anticipate many people downloading my thesis report, I have password protected the file because of its large file size. Please email me if you would like the username and password and I’ll be happy to send it to you.

While I was in London, I worked on some experience prototypes to test out a borrowing service. The first experience prototype looked at breadth by essentially implementing a borrowing/sharing service with myself as the mediator. Using insights from that prototype, I subsequently focused on the area of trust. Specifically, when going up to a stranger, what dynamics are involved in the negotiation and transaction? What information do they need, and what obstacles appeared? The insights I gained from these prototypes will inform the structure of my service.

Experience prototyping is necessary to validate or refute assumptions upon which I’m building this service. And since I’m focusing on real-world interactions, it’s necessary to work with real people.

An interesting option, however, was suggested by Karl Schroeder in his blog entry Rights Currencies, Reputation Economies, Dibs and MMORPGs. Namely, using game-spaces, such as MMORPGs, to prototype economic systems. The virtual nature of online games prevents or limits any real-world damage while presenting a relatively low barrier to entry (unlike, say, real-world economic systems which tend to require revolutions) and an opportunity for iterative testing.

We are in fact currently seeing some direct economic relationships developing between the virtual and real worlds: the online role-playing game Project Entropia is now allowing players to withdraw real cash from ATMs based on their in-game bank account.

As I noted in my other blog I’ve been helping Rapleaf with their debugging process and giving general feedback on the site. You can check out my current reputation on Rapleaf by clicking on the badge at right.

It also looks like the Applied Dream reputation project is getting popular. I’ve found it listed on quite a few sites, along with a lot of interesting comments.

Your Actions Follow You Around (worldchanging, with some great comments)

Your Actions Follow You Around (we make money not art)

RentAThing, a Portable Reputation Management System (the effects on marketing)

Reputation Rebang In Progress (makes a connection to freakonomics)

How Do You Measure Your Reputation? (reputation and the real-estate market)

RentAThing (Some other people working on reputation, from a P2P perspective, it seems)

RentAThing II (Another post on RentAThing from the above site)

Online reputaties voor dummies: RentAThing (Dutch, I think)

I’m in London for the next week or so, working on my thesis at live|work. I’ll be doing some iterative prototyping and checking out how things work around the office. Looks like it will be pretty cool.

I’ve be helping to debug and improve the RapLeaf site before its official launch. Don’t think I can talk about it just yet, but as I’ve noted before there are some similarities to my thesis…and some big differences. It’s a big playing field and lots of interesting things still to be done.

Regine at We Make Money Not Art has posted about the reputation management service project I did with Didier for the last Applied Dreams at IDII.

Oh, and I had some fish and chips tonight.