On one of my web wanderings reading about wikis and motivations for contributions, I started reading as much as I can about reputation systems. Last year around this time Yahoo released social design patterns for reputation systems. Wow, that’s generous.
There’s a fascinating interview on bokardo.com with Bryce Glass. From that interview, I pulled this definition: “one’s reputation in a community is both a history of one’s past actions within that community, and a value judgment about the worth of those actions.”
Clay Shirky has an argument against even well-designed reputation systems where he instead calls for community leadership.
My limited experience with reputation systems would tend to have me agree with Clay Shirky. While I’m not much of one for “gaming” the reputation system I can see how others may be entertained by that thought. But if you want something done, there’s nothing like true leadership. And a truthiness rating. 🙂
What do you think? Are there reputation systems that work well for you? Or do you tend toward more actions when inspired by a leader?
Edited to add:
Lisa Dyer has a great post, Using community equity to attract and develop talent, talking about Sun Microsystem’s work on reputation systems with Atlassian’s Confluence wiki. She has notes from “a presentation by Peter Reisen of Sun Microsystems, hosted on Atlassian TV.” Definitely worth reading!