Today we announced that we’ve joined Data Portability. In a couple of months, we’ll ship Clearspace Community 2.1 and as far as I can tell it’ll be the most “Data Portability compliant” enterprise software on the market. But so what?
Data Portability inside of a company?
Most of the stuff in Data Portability seems counterintuitive internally. Gia covers it well on her JiveTalks post and on her blog. Basically, there are all sorts of privacy and legal issues inside a company but it’s a no-brainer to have Data Portability in our externally facing product. In the meantime, we’re interested in working with the Data Portability group to help contribute to these standards as well as new ones as well. Hopefully, the organization is now at a point in its evolution to proceed with formal and elected leadership, a standards body, voting process and the rest of the stuff that makes organizations successful.
These pieces need to add up to a Reputation Standard
The one standard yet to exist that I think would add a ton of value is a “Reputation Standard.” This would be something that would work on the social web and within your company. The simplistic way to think about this is something like eBay’s customer ratings and a sort of “technorati rating.”
How would it work?
Potentially, you’d have a top-line weighting that would show others your relative standing. So, if you’re contributing to sites that embrace “reputation standards” your contributions and interactions are earned and connected to you. The fact that you contribute, that other people respond favorably to you, that you respond to them, the size and quality of your social graph– all these things improve to your standings. Now imagine not only having these data points on the social web but if your company is using intra-enterprise collaboration software that also uses a reputation standard then you could have a holistic picture of someone’s reputation. Would people try to game it? Sure, but people game everything.
Why is Robert Scoble’s reputation good?
Is it his bajillions of followers on Twitter and Friendfeed? Is it the amount of comments on his blog? Is it the amount he contributes to Flickr? What about his connection to other people who also have the same level of interaction? Perhaps it’s the strength of his ties to others, the positive tone of his interactions, how frequently he directly responds or his overall availability.
What if you could search for reputation?
Once you have values for reputation you should be able to search for it. Perhaps I could search Google and find people with expertise and relatively high reputations. Once social networks and collaboration software are standardized on the reputation standard I could do some contextual and meaningful people-location. This could help me find answers, invite the right people to collaborate and reinforce the right behavior.
Goodbye HR reference checking
Well not totally, but could you imagine the power of having a more objective perspective of people’s reputations. If someone looked great on paper, seemed like the best fit once interviewed and had an excellent reputation score, I’d hire that person in a second.
