[iDC] Some notes on value...

[Janet Hawtin]

On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 2:46 PM, Michael Bauwens
<michelsub2003 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Question:
>
>  Can we not distinguish between commercial brands, and other reputational brands, say like iDC or the P2P Foundation, and if so, what could be a mechanism to carry out that distinction. I think there must be a clear difference between manipulative commercial brands, say Nike, and civil society efforts which can obtain a reputation without such means.

It is sometimes difficult to tell.

Astroturfing can happen to or by people in open communities. some
commercial interests find open communities sufficiently threatening to
invest time or money in disrupting them. Part of the challenge for
reputation economies is being able to filter those kinds of
distortions.

For an example have a google for the Tux for indy 500 race suggestion
which was aggressively promoted within the linux community by .Net
folk because they had a Vista car and wanted the Linux community to
compete with it using community funding. It felt manipulative and
insincere so people didnt bite but these things are happening.

A 3 person ODF foundation was an entity which collected funds to
promote open document format.
At a critical point in the Microsoft ooxml standards process they
bagged odf and said they liked a w3c format better.
The w3c said their format was not an equivalent for the odf format.
The organisation then folded. It was not core to the development of
odf. The oasis group is the group which develops odf,
but it was a piece of name space pollution and effectively corruption
because they used the name to undo the format rather than promote it.

Advogato is an interesting reputation oriented community.
This video is great on the mechanics of reputation.
Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5092930485716426869

Janet