Simon Willis of Cisco’s Public Sector group and I were talking last week. I was saying that if the new administration were to create a civic social networking site, casual decisions by software designers could deeply affect democracy. For example, if the designers were to use a reputation system as a way of enabling the millions of conversations to scale, civic leaders might emerge for topics based upon a reputation system that is sensitive to small changes in software functionality — rate people on a scale of 1-10 or just with a thumbs up or thumbs down? Weight the ratings based on the rater’s own reputation?

Simon replied that this would be an interesting case of reputational democracy.

I sort of love this term. And it only gets three hits (1 2 3) at Google.

You heard it here first! Well, fourth.

[Tags: reputational_democracy memes simon_willis ]

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