by Flemming Funch
The approach in xpertweb is to make somebody's data so easily accessible in a standardized format that others will be likely to pick up and keep a copy of it. There are several incentives to do that, actually, and several positive outcomes of that.
Each person will have mentors who receive a small cut of the business, in exchange in part for helping that person get going, and also for acting as backup and validation nodes. So, if you yourself wipe out your disk and lose your data, you can be pretty sure that your mentor will have a copy of it, and you'll be back in action shortly.
Multiple copies in accessible standardized form will also allow others to verify the completeness and integrity of your data. For one thing, it makes it much harder to cheat. If somebody gave you negative feedback, and your mentor, amongst others, picked up a copy of that, you can't just cheat and go and delete it, even though the primary storage place for your activity is your own site. The people you carry out transactions with will also keep a copy, which again will stop you from messing with what really happened.
So, it is not only like double entry book keeping, where each action is debited in one place and credited in another. It is also like the entries are continuously being photocopied and mailed off-site.
This is all possible because the amount of data per person is relatively small. We're talking about transactions as a record of two or more people who come together to make an agreement for something to done, where that something then gets done, and where the parties then record their satisfaction with what happens. And if we were talking about the sale of a service, money would then change hands. But what we're recording is simply the steps of that cycle. Look for a person/product/service, negotiate an agreement on what should happen, make it happen, record comments and ratings about the whole thing. That's not much data. You could quite easily store the activity for hundreds of people.
And the point is exactly that an easily accessible, distributed, tamperproof information network, recording in simple terms what business transactions people agree to engage in, and how happy they are with the results - can possibly add up to a reliable picture of reputation.
If it were controlled from any one place, it probably wouldn't be reliable information.
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