In the documentary 2012: Time for Change and elsewhere, Daniel Pinchbeck proposes that we are currently on the cusp of a major technological paradigm shift. What he calls the "Wisdom Revolution" may take only a matter of years, the latest in a series of exponentially more rapid technological revolutions (agricultural, industrial, information) that fundamentally alter the landscape for human social organization. He characterizes this Wisdom Revolution as essentially the emergence of technologies and practices that help us better decide what is true and what to do.

The Wisdom Revolution will be characterized by the following two patterns, which are already realized in part by several emerging websites:.

Reputation economy

Most of the decisions we make about people involve reputation. We make a lot of decisions about whether to engage in some way with strangers, and sometimes we make the wrong decision due to incomplete knowledge of their ability, trustworthiness, etc. Conversely, we make a lot of decisions to continue engaging in business with people we already trust, but our support doesn't make it any easier for other people to trust them, except through an inefficient thing called word of mouth.

The idea of a reputation economy is that by implementing the "reputation graph" and making it a public resource, everyone will be able to make better decisions about people.

This is likely to be achieved with some sort of reputation points digital "uncurrency", perhaps resembling Bitcoin but with certain additional features. One party to a transaction can pay for some or all of the exchange using reputation points, which will benefit the other party but, in the right system, also benefit the first party. Essentially, a reputation economy could be constructed where all of the contributors to someone's reputation in a given area receive positive or negative meta-reputation in that area whenever that person receives positive or negative reputation in that area --- recursively across the whole graph.

Apart from basic inefficiency, this sort of system has the potential to obsolete a lot of the problems with the current economic system.

1. The fungibility of traditional money is a significant enabling factor of exploitation and stealing. Not so with reputation points.

2. Likewise, since reputation can be given about anything, the reputation graph is a powerful way for people to economically prefer people with shared values if they think it is important enough, as long as monitoring mechanisms are sufficiently accurate and cheating-resistant. For example, someone who believes that cooperation is paramount could only engage with people who have high cooperation reputations.

   Considering the ubiquity of mobile phones and the spread of augmented reality enabled smartphones, this idea (and the reputation graph in general) could have a powerful effect on basically everything.

3. Currently, there is a problem with the nature of innovation and investment. Although it would be nice if people innovated because of the intrinsic reward, it seems probable that systems where the profit motive is allowed to operate do better. There may be nothing wrong with that, but the problem with the current system is that people who happen to have money can gain outsize control of future innovation without doing any of the work. In fact, this is a general problem of capitalism: over any interval, people who provide money to an operation at the beginning reap rewards far above the value of any managerial abilities they contribute.

   Maybe it would be better if we had a system that recognized the value of large initial contributions to an endeavor, but then adjusted ownership of that endeavor over time to reflect the total contributions of everyone involved. The meta-reputation system described above could achieve such a result as long as meta-feedback is distributed proportionally among all reputation contributors. In this sort of "futures market for people", that would provide an incentive to discover undervalued nodes and a disincentive to form monocultures around already high-valued ones.

Fluid democracy

The key features of fluid democracy are transitive vote delegation, granularity, and continuous feedback flow.

Transitive delegation means that if I delegate my vote to you, you can delegate to someone else on behalf of both of us.

Granularity means that instead of the traditional way of voting for one person to make decisions about everything, you can choose whether to vote directly on issues yourself, delegate to someone else on a specific issue, delegate to someone else on a specific issue area, or even delegate to someone else on everything, depending on your preferences.

Continuous feedback means that instead of the traditional way of being able to change your vote every few years, you can change your vote as often as you want.

In addition to transitive delegation, granularity, and continuous feedback, another feature likely to be part of an optimal fluid democracy is the ability to divide your vote among multiple people at your desired ratio.

It is easy to imagine how these characteristics would result in a fluid hyperarchy/adhocracy instead of the usual rigid hierarchy. Hyperarchy.com has a nice summary of fluid democracy.

If you think about it, a reputation economy and a fluid democracy are really just two names for the same thing. A system that reflects this fact will succeed massively. Our tendency to think of political decision-making and economic decision-making as separate is largely an artifact of our technological limitations and the organization that they necessitated (a quasi-free market exchange economy consisting of people acting to fulfill their individual goals plus a parasitic command hierarchy supposedly choosing and achieving group goals). In the right implementation of a fluid democracy/reputation economy, group goals should simply be the emergent sum of all the individual goals.

The following are some of the projects that have started to implement fluid democracy and the reputation graph. They all include important aspects of a successful implementation, and I would in fact argue that if you take the best aspects from all of them, they include everything needed. Some question remains as to whether the reputation graph can be implemented in a decentralized way akin to Bitcoin or to whether we are destined to continue to rely on centralized services whose honesty cannot provably be maintained.

LiquidFeedback

LiquidFeedback is an open source fluid democracy implementation written by the Public Software Group in Berlin. It is notably being used by the members of the Pirate Party of Berlin to deliberate on issues, although not yet bindingly.

You can delegate on specific issues, issue areas, or globally. The Schulze method is used for deciding outcomes. It doesn't seem that you can currently split your vote delegation among multiple people. They don't seem to have realized that their data has an underlying reputation graph.

LiquidFeedback is written in Lua and badly needs some UX/UI love.

Another liquid democracy implementation coming out of Germany is Adhocracy.

PieTrust

PieTrust is an "open company" created by Bayle Shanks. Its vision seems to be very comprehensive. In addition to the PieTrust website, this Ignite San Diego talk is intriguing. It seems to have been in private alpha testing for about a year.

As at least one of their reputation models, they use an iterated giving algorithm where members of an open company say how much they would give to other members if they had $100, and a simulation uses that information to determine the collective appraisal of the amount of value created by each member, and thus how much credit (or money, reputation, votes, etc.) they should get.

PieTrust proposes that the reputation graph would be useful to traditional companies who want to do some things according to more peer-based processes, such as performance bonuses. I do think that corporations are, broadly, a likely candidate to adopt the reputation graph, because they often spend significant organizational resources just tracking who is good at what, and even more often are inefficient when they fail to do so, but I have a few questions:

• How can the PieTrust iterated giving model work in an environment without companies, i.e. with a bunch of freelancers working in periodic associations that have much less well-defined group ties?

• How can traditional corporations be the vector for reputation economy adoption when the people who control traditional corporations are those who stand the most to lose from adopting less fungible currencies?

Connect.me

Connect.me aims to provide "Your reputation card. All the social proof you need." They have hit on three of the key features that the winning reputation graph implementation must have: an (embeddable) card that succinctly displays a user's reputation, as well as identity; a searchable directory of people; and (according to some comments on Twitter, it would seem) an API so that sites can build domain-specific applications on top of the reputation graph.

However, from what is visible of their card display, reputation figures for skills are an absolute number, making it hard to actually know exactly what the reputation means. And from the existence of headings titled "Trust Levels" and "Trust Anchors" under "How it Works", and mentions on Twitter of the "honest vouching principle", it would appear that Connect.me is not using algorithms that are provably resistant to collusion and cheating.

They seem to be gaining some traction - 2000+ Twitter followers, already talk of scaling.

Hypothes.is

Hypothes.is is an interesting one. They seem to be aiming for a platform that allows sentence-level analysis of written arguments and threaded discussions. It is easy to see how this has tie-ins to reputation, and they are heavily focusing on the reputation model. (For instance, imagine a graph of propositions and their logical relationship to each other, rated as to their truth or falsehood by anyone, with their ratings weighted by the reputations of raters in relevant areas. Now that's a new kind of epistemology.)

Hypothes.is had a successful Kickstarter funding round and has a host of well-known advisers. They seem likely to succeed. It might be a good guess that as they develop the underlying reputation API for their discussion annotation platform, they will eventually come to focus on the reputation part of it, and see the discussion annotation platform as merely one (very important) use of a reputation API.

Hyperarchy

Hyperarchy is basically a lightweight version of LiquidFeedback without a sucky UI and with a really inspiring description of liquid democracy on their About page.

Of note, they're related to Pivotal Labs, makers of Pivotal Tracker, one of the best software development workflow management software packages, making them a prime candidate to successfully introduce liquid democracy via forward-thinking corporations.

They've been live at least since July 2011 and don't seem to have made too much of a splash.

RG Labs

RG Labs is probably the biggest wildcard in the bunch. Still yet to launch anything concrete, they're led by Jon Bischke, a successful serial entrepreneur and the person who seems to have coined the term "reputation graph".

They seem to be focusing on the ability of the reputation graph to disrupt traditional education models, which will be very important as we transition from a monolithic credential-based model of education to a more granular reputation-based one.

Others

There are other projects working in this space. One that comes to mind is Kickstarter. Imagine what would happen if they relaxed their restriction on "fund my life" projects, or innovated a bit more on the way funders can provide feedback for projects, or if the SEC allowed crowd-funding as a way of distributing stock.

Oh, and by the way, I didn't mean to disparage any of these projects with my mostly critical comments, it's just that they're all obviously super awesome, and we should just look for commonalities, strengths, and weaknesses in order to determine how best to move forward.

I think there's still plenty of room for something new in the reputation graph/fluid democracy space, and if you'd like to work on it with me -- or if you know of a project in this space that I'm not aware of -- feel free to email me at m@mwhite.info.