Outline of discussion points for this blog

Hey Everybody,
I've spent the past several years working on other projects and thinking/discussing my reputation system concept with various people. However, it is time that this project move out into the marketplace of ideas and start benefiting from the input of all of you.

I've been meaning to do this for a long time (having even set up this blog nearly two years ago), but it's time to finally get it off the ground.

Here is a brief outline of some of the areas that I want this blog to focus on:

1) Political Theory
-a) Legal Systems v. reputation systems as regulatory devices
--i) Norm selection/creation
--ii) Norm revision/interpretation
--iii) Norm enforcement
--iv) History

-b) The Evolution of Government and the role of Violence
--i) Discontent and civil unrest
--ii) Violent oppression
--iii) Democratic institutions (access to voting, communication, transparency etc...)
--iv) Universal Human Rights as a (misguided) attempt to find an extra-political authority for the basic ground rules of our political interactions.
---A) Interpretation (words do not have inherent meaning)
---B) Enforcement (a community will live by the guidelines that the government and the citizenry are willing and and capable of enforcing regardless of what has been written down on paper somewhere or what principles are proclaimed in speeches)


2) Reputation 3.0
-a) Goals
--i) create an information community/system that is self regulating

-b) Social Architecture
--i) Values of the Community
--ii) Tools to enable self-regulation
--iii) Means of inspiring contribution and activity / removing barriers to participation
--iv) Big questions -
---A) Information Privacy and Reputation
---B) Libel/Slander
---C) Conflict Resolution
---D) The role of money, direct and indirect

-c) Technical Arhitecture
--i) centralized vs. distributed architecture
--ii) a market for Bandwidth, Memory and Processing time?
--iii) Infrastruction and Operations Funding
--iv) Data Storage
---A) Object Oriented Data
---B) Mapping Relationships between Data
---C) subscription and update algorithms
--v) user interface(s)

-d) Building it
--i) proof of concept
--ii) scaling

Omnocracy v. Semantic Web

I've been reading through some of the documentation for RDF and XML over the last few days and have come to some conclusions about the similarities and differences between the "semantic-web" concept as it currently stands and my present vision for a reputation based annotation community.

1) both recognize the need for the atomization of data (both internal and external to the system), the use of URI's for identification of pieces and the need for a subject/predicate/object syntax to foster use of these resources.

2) both recognize that this is all useful to facilitate a broader sharing and remixing of information.

3) both recognize (I believe) that at some levcl, schema's need to be defined as separate layers so that "data-structure" is not hard-wired into the data. Without such separation, remixability and re-purposing of data would be severely inhibited.

4) However, I believe the semantic web is a different layer in the hierarchy than the omnocracy system I am attempting to design.

5) Omnocracy requires the structural attributes of the semantic web, but is designed to do something different. The decentralized nature of the semantic web would likely inhibit the processing time for a layered processing of data from n-nodes on n-layers. As such, I do think that some sort of centralized storage system may be required for Omnocracy to rapidly return results. It is most certainly possible to implement omnocracy in a distributed form, but this would almost certainly be accompanied by large time delays when complex processing occurs. Perhaps, there could be a centralized caching of all material (google-style) for rapid processing for information that required it. At the same time, this increases infrastructure costs (for the central firm housing all this) tremendously (i.e. there would be virtually none otherwise).