When Meatspace isn't Marketspace
Like Doc said,
"It's getting real interesting now." This Digital ID meme
polyblog has been like pulling a string out of a sweater. I've been gnawing
on the problem of reputation and identity since Mitch Ratcliffe pointed
out that I was talking about reputation and everyone else was talking about
DigitalID. I've thrown away a few thousand words, (aren't you glad?) and am
just beginning to get at the core issue that's been troubling me: Digital
ID has nothing to do with Digital Reputation, and we don't want it to.
Andre Durand won't
agree with that, but I think it's implicit in his work. Everyone's quoting Andre's
3 tiers of identity white
paper, which led Doc to come up with his Mydentity, Ourdentity,
Theirdentity model.
Then I read Andre's Anatomy
of a Reputation and I finally got it (well, felt I got it enough to quit
agonizing over my cluelessness). Andre has thought about this longer, harder
and better than the rest of us, and has framed the conversation beautifully.
Despite that contribution, I think Andre wants to tie reputation too closely
with ID, perhaps because his PingID start-up
wants to manage both of them for businesses and us, but more probably because
we're all doing it.
Let's be clear: the only reason we're jamming on this Digital ID stuff is that
we're working out how it affects us on the internet and, more personally, how
we can cooperate to build personas that live on the
net which have higher value than than the ones we can develop in our zip code.
When I need a financial analysis, I need analysis, not an analyst. I don't care
what the creator of my solution does in his spare time with whom of which gender
or species, under what influences. I just want someone who's the Commander Data
relative to my solution, not Jean-Luc Picard, idealized in every regard.
Isn't that our grievance with managerial capitalism? Aren't employees tired
of having to act, look, vote, nod and grovel in particular ways, when the real
assignment is to keep the network up? Every 10,000-job business would be better
off with 30,000 ad hoc experts than with their experts at job-holding. The takeaway
from that viewpoint is that a specialized task—real work—needs a
reputation, an Ourdentity. The real-person carbon-based Mydentity
may be necessary to hold down a job in finance, but not for buying financial
analyses over the internet (is it consulting? an Excel template? a macro? do
you care?).
As Doc points
out tonight, "It isn't who you are, it's how you blog. . .'After
all, who cares who you are?'"
Or, as my old buddy Jerry Vass tells his
Fortune clients, "The buyer doesn't care if the salesman lives or dies,
as long as he doesn't die on the premises."
For those of us not in the business of selling Digital ID services
to businesses:
Forget about linking Digital ID to Digital Reputation. There's no
there there.
Andre tells us in Reputation,
"Reputations only really exist within the context of your interactions
with others, and therefore, a reputation can be viewed as existing in the space
between you and others."
Like your shadow, your reputation is attached to you but doesn't belong to
you. When you want something real done, what you want is work performed under
a terrific reputation that doesn't get ruined during your assignment. The personality
behind the reputation, unfortunately, is no more relevant to your task than
the shadows in Plato's
Cave are related to reality. In the coming world of work-not-jobs, tasks
will be parsed to expertise, rather than referred to the IT people
for further study.
First Principles
To get my head around the possibility of a DigID-DigRep disconnect, I had to
go back to our core dialogue, as inspired by the Great
Hintchoochoo. The market is a conversation, the internet enables a human
voice, peer-to-peer trumps B2C, organizations are dehumanizing, etc., etc.
You know–all the truths we should review every morning instead of the
market report.
But the Cluetrain truths led me into a confusion. In my longing for human voices
in the marketplace, I'd somehow got the idea that my transactions could be truly
like my conception of the old personalized Agora, but it can't be designed that
way. Unless you're an ATM, meatspace has nothing to do with the
marketplace. That's not my or Xpertweb's problem, so I don't have anything to
add to the Mydentity discussion.
Since Xpertweb is all about reputation, we need to understand how best to value
each other. Here are Andre's talking points from Anatomy
of a Reputation, and how Xpertweb is hoping to develop Ourdentities
based on those points:
Attributes of a Reputation
What You Say . . .Of all the ways to create a reputation,
telling people what they should think of you is both the weakest and carries
the least amount of weight in the real world. That said, what you say about
yourself can serve to amplify a positive opinion of you if it is consistent
with your actions (in their experience). Likewise, what you say about yourself
can negatively impact one’s image of you if it is inconsistent with
their experiences with you.
What You Do "Actions speak louder than
words" embodies this attribute of an identity. Nothing serves to more
quickly establish a reputation than one's actions.
Which means: Aggregate your reputation by capturing every
customer's candid rating of the task you performed. Make that a quantitative
and qualitative rating, collected before the tears of happiness
are dry, so it's got to be part of the invoice. Use only your customers'
words and numbers when putting your service or product before the public.
If they like what your customers have said, they may look further, so your
home page looks like
this:
- "My 183 jobs have an average 88.6% rating. Click here for every
task grade and comment."
- Mission/Nutshell Statement: 43 words or so
- A longer How I Work for You statement
- Your even longer Exemplary Projects listing
- Your reflective Things I Care About statement, which feels
like a web log
- Maybe a resume, but by this point, who cares?
What's Public Certain elements of our reputation are
public, that is, generally known by us (the owner of the reputation) and by
others who know us. . .Generally speaking, we work to reinforce positive elements
of our reputation and diminish negative ones. If I knew that I'd been branded
a 'tight-wad' when it comes to paying my bar tab, I might over-pay in the
future to counteract a negative impression of my reputation as being generous.
Which means: Publish every promise and every outcome. Xpertweb transaction
tracking is optional, but when used, the metrics of the task are known to
every successive customer or seller. As Andre suggests here, being observed
improves one's performance. It's both common sense and a management theory
known as the Hawthorne
Effect since the early 1930's. What better way to develop conscientiousness
and competence than to give people a bully pulpit from which to strut their
stuff?
What’s Private Certain facets of my reputation
are private, and will never be known to me or others. Individuals who choose
to create a new identity are doing nothing more than running from their reputation.
Which means: We can't be certain of someone without a reputation. Once
we have a metric for quality, published universally, it may become more
risky to deal with someone without a documented reputation. But the flip
side is compelling as well.
Xpertweb, like shareware, has a way to make it easy to build a reputation
whether starting out or starting over. Deliver your benefit first and calibrate
the price to the buyer's rating. The prospective buyer knows it's a riskless
purchase (not just money-back-after-a-hassle but grade-based pricing), and
has no reason to hesitate to let the seller show what she can do. If a failed
Xpertweb user tries a new persona with a new mentor (perhaps offering more
modest services), it might take just six months to establish a new reputation,
just like the first time. Maybe this time will work.
This is the societal payoff from a system that recycles failure into new
reputation opportunities. Our collective goal is not to banish failed first
attempts to an occupational debtor's prison, but to help anyone find a new
skill or a better approach to a flawed skill.
What Context Lastly, while in real life and in every
day conversation we do in fact attempt to summarize an individual’s
reputation (e.g. "…she’s an amazing person."), the fact
is, our reputation is contextual and it is quite possible for me to have a
positive reputation in one area of my life with individual A and a negative
reputation in another area of my life with individual B.
Which means: When you understand the context of an expert, you can understand
the expertise. One benefit is to recycle failure into success. Another is
the opportunity to know where an expert comes from, by training and mentoring.
Every Xpertweb user has at least one unique ID. If Jim Franklin's ID is
ADCGEFH, then you know that Mary Billing, whose ID is ADCGEFHC
has been mentored directly by Franklin–specifically, his 3rd protegé.
Every ID reveals who mentored whom, published ratings let you know how good
Mary is, as well as all others mentored by Franklin and his mentor as well.
The Digital Reputation
While historically reputations have been somewhat vague and subjective, in
the digital world they are likely to become more objective, binary and long-lasting
(all the reason to take them seriously). Biologically, time is a built-in
eraser, allowing us to forget and move on. In the digital world however, where
memory is cheap and caching the norm, our reputations are likely to become
more persistent . . . Probably more important, in the digital world, our various
reputations which are today disconnected are likely to become more connected,
if not by us, then by others.
Which means: We get the best of both worlds. We'll be able to deal with
proven experts without risk, yet not force them to be more than the skilled
specialists they are, allowing them to be fully human (i.e., flawed) rather
than the perfect employee. Instead of working for their boss, they'll be
working for a customer. And not a consumer in sight.
Might reputation systems spark the productivity renaissance we expected from
computers? People holding down a job are lucky to be on task a third of the
time. Experts focusing their talents are likely to be productive half the time.
That's a 50% productivity jump for everyone attracted into a reputation-enabled craft.
11:51:59 PM 
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