With the rise of social networking, the advent of provable identities, and ways to authorize access, there is a growing need for a reputation system to recognize good content and good people.

I have been working on this and my principles have been that the system needs to:

• be simple and available as an API,

• be decentralized and accept other systems to participate,

• contain security measures that prevent gaming and abuse,

• be transparent to users so that you know the hows and whys of the score (the correct level needs to be found here to prevent gaming)

• accept reputation for any provable identity (including other systems),

• collect explicit scoring from users,

• implicitly derive reputation of identities by observing current and past behavior,

• associate multiple identities. This means that http://alice.example.com should be able to associate her good karma with her secret http://timerider.example.org identity. This association must be kept hidden for others,

• recognize different categories. A person may be highly rated in some areas, and not in others,

• use a voting model that matches the real world. This model must be limited and untraceable between all parties. Positive behavior should be rewarded.

APIs needed:

• Signup. A user signs up by proving to the system that she own a URL. In exchange, the system creates some shared secret that can be used to authenticate (and possibly encrypt) API requests and responses.

• Bind. Binds an identity to a user’s existing identity.

• Lookup. Looks up the reputation for a specific category. The set of categories is intentionally kept small for simplicity.

• Vote. Submits a reputational vote for a user and a specific category.

• Some security related APIs with a simple way to handle the life cycle of keys and trust.

There could be some possible APIs for user’s profile management, and perhaps statistics.

For the back-end, there are other APIs that needs to be implemented to handle decentralized sharing and calculation of scores. More on that in a later post.