A Sustainable Train of Thought

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’ve been working on some definitions for reputation and identity which I hope will help to focus my work and clarify what exactly I’m focusing on. What exactly do I mean by “reputation” and “identity”? Why is reputation valuable? I’m glad you asked.

Premise
The quality of the transactions you engage in with other people builds your reputation.

Therefore:

If your reputation gives you access (discounts, use of objects, etc.),
and
If this access has a corresponding value to you,
Then reputation could be used as currency.
Once reputation is a currency (i.e.: has real value) then various scenarios are possible. Some of these scenarios are outlined in the Applied Dreams presentation.

Reputation
Reputation is your history of behavior as reflected through person-to-person transactions (or potentially person-to-object or person-to-service transactions). These historical transactions build your reputation, with “reputation” itself as the momentary or immediate summation of your history.

The value of reputation lies in helping to mitigate risk in future transactions. The assumption is that if you know what I’ve done in the past, then you may have a better chance at predicting my behavior in the future.

Reputation has a trend component which is just as important as the immediate summation of historical transactions. Specifically, a more recent transaction potentially holds greater weight than older transactions. For example, losing a borrowed book when I was five is less relevant than if I lost a borrowed book yesterday. Making this information available to others may impact your transactions by making it easier to more difficult to gain access, e.g.: your discount increases or decreases, your social circle of willing lenders may expand or contract.

Identity
Your identity is in part a reflection of your reputation, and as such has a component which is constantly in flux. Identity has a grounded component which never changes (your “constant” identity) and a flexible component which reflects your current reputation and its trend. By proxy, then, your reputation trend also becomes part of your flexible identity and is as important as the reputation value (number) itself.

I realize that establishing your “constant” identity is extremely important—one person must have only one constant identity. However, in my thesis I am not interested in pursuing issues of verification and authentication.

In a future post I’ll define “transactions” and “ratings” and clarify some other reputation management system mechanics, but for now I need to hit the sack.

So it looks like Opinity and Rapleaf have joined forces. The announcement of their partnership uses the term “silos of reputation” which I’ve used before to describe the current state of affairs regarding reputation. In other words, your credit rating is not related to your eBay reputation which in turn is not related to your driving record.

I suppose that making this information publicly available and bound to a single identity could be seen as problematic and dangerous, but I also think there any many advantages to be gained from visible histories, particularly when working or dealing with strangers. In the near-term I don’t think these advantages are quite as apparent as in the future, were these systems to become more widespread and frequented.

What kind of advantages am I talking about? Aside from the social benefits, which I’ve discussed in a previous post, and some of the potential advantages described in the Applied Dreams presentation, other include:

• Anyone can be a delivery or courier service (assuming adequate security safeguards). If you’re going to Berlin, and I need to get a package to someone in Berlin, then perhaps I can pay you to deliver that package for me. My past history with package deliveries might make you more or less inclined to use my services.

• Travel partners. Perhaps I’m looking for a companion to travel with around Europe. Aside from agreeable schedules, I could also use some reassurance about your character. Or perhaps I’m looking for a veteran traveller with good knowledge about a particular region.

• Restaurant recommendations. Sure, these already exist in rudimentary form, but there’s really no way to capture information about trends or affinities. Perhaps histories can reveal a particular person with food tastes similar to yours, which might mean that their assessment of a restaurant would closely mirror your own. In effect, histories can create personally meaningful and personally accurate judgements. Obviously this develops into massive complexity, but putting that aside for the moment, there’s no reason that these sorts of affinities need stop with restaurants: movies, hotels, museum exhibitions, books, and video games are all potential markets, to name a few.

• House guests. Briefly described in the presentation, perhaps you have built up such a great reputation as a house guest that any home in the world is potentially available to you. This sort of future integrates existing social networks into reputation management: how far removed from someone can you be to still enjoy these advantages? A friend of a friend of your aunt’s brother? Or can we imagine a world in which literally anyone would be willing to give you a place to stay?

• Intent to rent. Perhaps objects in the future will be intentionally designed to accommodate sharing and renting behavior as part of this system. You’ll buy a car with the idea that it provides an additional source of income at the expense of a few compromises. So the car might have roomier seats and more luggage capacity than its non-intentioned version. You could still rent anything and everything; “intent to rent” design just makes it easier.

These are just some of the potentials that reputation management systems could afford people. I’m working on some additional concepts and implementations as part of my thesis…

Any other ideas?

Some other reputation management systems:

• Opinity
• iKarma

So far all the management systems I’ve seen focus mainly on online transactions. The Rapleaf blog mentions offline transactions, as does this article in SiliconBeat, but I’m not sure how they actually handle them. According to the article you have to go to the website and engage in a rating process which takes place online, complete with emails. Another aspect of the service that comes through from the description is that it’s more about judging transactions and not the use of objects. The example they use is selling and buying U2 tickets. I think that looking at these offerings will help me focus and get more particular with my thesis.

Didier pointed out Rapleaf to me today. It’s a reputation management system which is further detailed in an article on TechCrunch, as the actual service isn’t publicly available online yet.

The basic concept is the same as what we produced for the Applied Dream —trust and reputation built up between individuals—but it seems they are taking a web-based approach to their transaction management system, which is arguably more practical and “today” than a spime-based world (which for obvious reasons doesn’t exist at the moment). Obviously this impacts my thesis topic now, but I think there’s room to maneuver in terms of the actual off-line interactions and how people build and assess reputation.

Amazon.com uses reputation in weighting reviews that people submit, giving “higher quality” work greater prominence on the site.

So how do they determine quality and reputation? Good question.

We also look at who authored the content. If the author has a strong reputation (the product of community feedback about the author’s past works), it’s likely his or her new work is of high quality.

Past reviews contribute to the assumed quality of the present work, although I don’t see any mention of time in their calculations.

What is my reputation? Your reputation is based on the Community’s assessment of your activity (e.g. content you have authored) at Amazon.com. Positive votes on your content will improve your reputation.

An additional aspect to their reputation calculation is the concept of Real Name™ attribution. In essence, you make public your real name (based on the name used on your credit card) and this type of honesty positively weights your recommendations. In essence, revealing your true name is seen as a statement that you stand by what you have written.

More interestingly, though:

Sometimes we have very little information about a piece of content because the author is relatively new and/or because there are few votes on the content. This is where Real Name™ attributions come in.

So an additional property of a Real Name™ is that it helps newbies establish a reputation. In essence, it’s a step you can take for free that immediately puts you on good footing for future recommendations and transactions. I suppose that for a newbie it speaks of intentionality and interest in participating, but there is another aspect of fracturing identity within Amazon which I’m not so sure about. I like the idea of a “free” step, but I’m not sure I like how it can potentially penalize people who don’t take that step.

Victor sent me a link about Google Payments Seller Reputation a while ago, but with all the craziness at the time I wasn’t able to check it out until now.

Looks like they’re going for the standard five stars approach, along with some qualitative comments about the process. Again, the comments aren’t standardized, and I don’t really understand the point behind star rating systems in general. With the reputation management system Didier and I worked on for the Applied Dream, we went with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to evaluate a transaction, because in the end you’d either engage in another transaction with that person or you wouldn’t.

I think a yes or no is much easier to decipher than a star rating, particularly because the stars don’t actually equate to anything meaningful. I understand what five stars means and one star, but what differentiates a two from a three from a four? It becomes a matter of subjective opinion, and at that point the common basis for understanding the rating degrades. Simply put, because of my particular value system that I attach to those stars, my two-star rating may mean something completely different from your two-star rating or even your three-star rating.

• Managing multiple identities – is reputation a constant amongst various online or virtual identities? Does it form the common link between them all? Or can reputation fracture according to the specific identity you inhabit at the moment?

I think it’s actually more interesting to consider reputation as a constant amongst various identities, because it adds a layer of complexity to the somewhat uni-dimensional identities we establish online. Those identities, I’d venture to say, are based on stereotypes and assumptions as much on the part of the people viewing those identities as they are projected by the individuals who inhabit them.

So maybe the guy who’s really into the death-metal scene IS really good with kids. Such a revelation asks us to confront our assumptions, preconceptions, and stereotypes about individuals. I think this aspect is a particularly interesting part of the idea, because it starts to deal with social relationships and creating stronger or more meaningful bonds between people.

How does this relate to sustainability? Well, I think that of the environmental, economic, and social aspects of sustainability, the social aspect is (at least for me) rather difficult to grasp. I mean, what is social sustainability? It’s the one part of the three which I haven’t really focused on, aside from tacitly acknowledging that people need to like solutions and want to use them. But is there more to it?

I think there is. I think social sustainability addresses issues of community and relationships between people. I can see it relating to environmental concerns because we need to acknowledge that other people are real, as silly as that sounds. My sense is that as we lead more virtual lives, connected via email and phone calls more than handshakes and family dinners, the understanding that we are all human beings becomes something akin to background noise.

Flickr.com has testimonials, but what strikes me is that there is no standardized format used in a testimonial, nor is there any way to see what relationship you have with the person whose given you a testimonial, nor is there any centralized system to indicate what a testimonial actually means. And I mean the last one in the sense of a witness more than anything else. There has to be a standardized or generally accepted valuation of a testimony for the testimony to actually have weight.

Sure, you can leave a testimonial simply as a way to say nice things about other people, which is fine. But for a testimonial to hold more weight, say to act as some kind of collateral or background check, then there needs to be some way of ensuring the testimony is accurate and that there’s a way to compare it against other testimonies. Comparison is important in terms of better-ness or relationships between people and so forth.

I also think that there has to be some substance to the testimony, either in terms of examples given, or in relationship to specific events. Otherwise, if a testimony is about how nice a person you are, but there are no examples, then there really isn’t much to back up such an assertion.

This might sound petty, but when you’re dealing with total strangers, you want to know certain things, such as the reliability of the record of your actions, who the people are who’ve testified for you, their relationship to you, and the nature of the transactions which they testified about. It’s very important for reasons of trust and security to ensure this information is accurate, concise, understandable, and standardized.

Note: My posts from this point on are probably going to be somewhat chaotic as I digest the process the last Applied Dream and explore opportunities. Entries will still be related to sustainability, although is less obvious ways than in previous posts.

Looks like New York City is always interested in your parking habits. And to increase their profits from parking fees and parking tickets, they’ve installed some solar-powered parking meters which accept credit card payments, according to an article on BemroseBooth.com

“Parking is one of the biggest challenges in a large, congested city with limited space, and the DOT continues to look for new ways to make parking easier for drivers,” said Transportation Commissioner Iris Weinshall. “Under Mayor Bloomberg’s leadership, the City is embracing new technologies to improve the quality of life for all New Yorkers.”

The numbers tell the story:

In the past 18 months, a number of other major U.S. cities have installed pay and display machines with credit card payment facilities and have seen parking revenues increase by up to 40%, on a like-for-like basis. In some cases, up to 60% of all transactions are being completed with credit cards, as drivers find them particularly convenient and are, therefore, inclined to pay for the maximum parking period permitted. Card transactions reduce the volumes of cash that have to be collected by the operators, making them a more secure and cost-effective means of payment.

I find this interesting because of the obvious conflict of interest: the city wants to provide parking for vehicles because fees and fines provide a very large source of revenue for the city. (This report (.pdf) suggests that 14,000 parking spaces can generate $33 million a year from metered parking rates alone.) Yet at the same time, traffic is a huge problem in the city. As described in this report, over 830,000 cars enter the Central Business District of Manhattan, 60% of which are personal cars. This means that the other 40% of vehicle traffic consists of trucks, buses, commercial vehicles, and taxis.

(I found the above links on schallerconsult.com)

Now, I remember hearing about a service which parks you car for you in Manhattan. Not such a big deal, right? Well, this valet service (if you can call it that), is for your personal car, which they stash somewhere around Manhattan, moving vehicles around as alternate side of the street parking goes into effect. When you want your car, you call the service up and they tell you when they’ll be able to deliver your car to you.

In effect (or at least as I imagine something like this working), you get home to your brownstone after a weekend in the Hamptons, give the keys to some dude from this service, he runs off with your car and parks it somewhere. You don’t need your car during the week, so the service moves the car around to avoid parking tickets and the like. When you need your car the next weekend, you give the service a call. Someone goes out and fetches the car and delivers it to your doorstep. Not a cheap service, by far, but it’s an interesting model to take inspiration from or build upon.