I’m far from being an expert in this topic, but I have been invited to participate in the Yale Information Society Project Symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace, where I will speak in the panel on “Making a Name Online”, based on our experiences with launching the P2P Foundation from scratch.

Part of the exercise was responding to a number of key questions, to which other participants will respond as well.

Here is my response with some basic thoughts about Reputation Economies:

What are the new norms for cyber-reputation?

It is important to recognize that reputation is a manyfold and plural element, strongly dependent on context. The reputation in eBay, based on the trustworthyness of the financial and material transactions, cannot be simply equated with the reputation obtained in Linux through one’s expertise and engagement in the project, or to one’s quality as a host in a mailing list. A particular form of reputation may be valued in one context, but not in another. I would also distinguish internal and external reputation in the following sense. One’s engagement and contribution within a project creates a inner ‘reputational hierarchy’, but this reputation can only transpire on the outside by the overall reputation of the project itself. There is no necessary transmission between the internal reputation, which may only be visible to a inner circle, and an outside reputation. However, clearly, a good inner reputation, combined with the high external visibility of a project, may result in a spillover effect, whereby the inner reputational currency is translated into a concrete external reputation. For the outside world, a condensation and projection effect may occur, whereby only a select few leading contributors are recognized as the face of the movement. There is also a general reputational effect, whereby one’s participation in a known and reputable project, produces a general effect of identity creation and external recognition.

How do these depart from offline models?

Cyber-reputation lacks the face to face dynamics of the physical world, but that is not necessarily a weakness, and in any case, it is a mistake to separate the online world from physical realities, as these are both intertwined and part of the continuum of social life. Their relationship is complex: Face to face elements may indeed illuminate, but also, obscure reputational processes, for example, charm may be constitutive of an offline reputation, but may be an illusory element.

Cyber-reputation has the advantage of measurability and transparency. This does not mean an obligation that reputation necessarily needs to be formally measured, but rather that actions and contributions in the online world leaves traces, that can be judged by all. There is therefore a certain element of objectivity to online reputation.

How can reputation in one online system be transported to another?

This creates a prior question: do they have to? Is it really necessary? I am far from convinced by this. Every project, community has different contexts, in which reputation can be gained, or lost. Because the online world is not isolated but co-constitutive of a same reality, persons do not necessarily come without reputation in a new project. This does not depend on any formal measurement.

How do you cash out?

It is important to distinguish the ethical economy of sharing and of commons-oriented peer production, which is non-reciprocal in nature and follows a process of self-unfolding, with intentional activities in view of monetization. If the link between both is not direct, then monetization is a ‘post hoc’ effect of indirect reputational, cognitive and relational gains obtained by engagement. If the link is direct, not only can a crowding out effect occur, whereby monetization displaces voluntary engagement but it can also corrupt value creation by transforming the absolute quality of peer production into the relative quality characteristic of competitive for-profit innovation.

Cashing out may be the wrong question, or should at the very least be context-specific.

It will differ in at least four contextual realities: 1) sharing communities a la YouTube, where the attention is cashed out; 2) commons-oriented peer production, where the commons is free but attending services can be marketed; 3) crowdsourcing approaches where minipreneurs do not produce for use value (as in the two previous models) but for exchange value. Sharism and communism are better served with benefit-sharing approaches, rather than revenue-sharing approaches.

Who owns one’s online reputation? Who owns the metadata?

The move to generalized transparency is a very strong argument towards an open social graphs, whereby the metadata would indeed be under the control of the users, who could modulate, a la Creative Commons, the degree to which they are willing to share their metadata.

How is reputation connected to the interoperability question? Should we have international standards governing reputation?

Yes, if reputation is indeed transportable, which I question, it should be exportable. The question is: who owns your reputation? Should you have veto power over its export, for example in case of a unfair negative reputation?