We’re extremely serious in what we’ve been doing for the past 3 years, we are certifying digital IDs in 37 countries and just signed up a major contract with the French government in order to provide certified digital IDs to all the French citizens.

So I would really appreciate that my comment remains here as what Craig’s been calling for the web’s next big problem is what we’re trying to work on: a distributed trust label.
Thank you!

Charles Nouÿrit
Founder & CEO of http://myid.is

Instead of a regular democracy, where everyone has one vote, what we have in WOT can be called a meritocracy. In our system, all votes are evaluated by their merit. Unlike in a typical meritocracy, we don’t know anything about you, your social status, or your skills, but we do know how you have voted in the past. Using a number of statistical algorithms, we compare your voting behavior with that of other users, and determine exactly how much we can trust you.

If a user’s voting behavior is completely erratic, or we notice an actual attempt to manipulate reputations, we simply don’t trust that user’s votes as much anymore. In WOT, trust has to be earned.

I tried to reason about this in some papers in the past, for example in “Trust metrics on controversial users: balancing between tyranny of the majority and echo chambers”
http://www.gnuband.org/papers/trust_metrics_on_controversial_users_balancing_between_tyranny_of_the_majority_and_echo_chambers-2/
I tried to back all my claims with empirical analysis on real trust networks (mainly derived from Epinions.com)

I’m totally for what I call local trust metrics: the code is open source, you run it locally on your computer, so this means that you can set your own parameters (trust horizon, propagation, algorithm, timeout, …). Of course most people will use the detault values of the most known open source trust metrics available but it is at least possible to not been told by someone else (google, the government, the matrix, whatever) “who you should trust”. What if the global trust metric tells you you should not trust your mother? ;)

We have been working on open standards and collaboration across all the major consumer potals and enterprise companies for 5 years. The most recent development includes the Open Identity Exchange that hosts trust frame works the first on coming from the US gov. Subsequent ones are forthcoming for PBS and OCLC.

How many people would be prepared to share that kind of information?

People’s motivations are frustratingly complex, and the trust war becomes quite an arms race between those who are trying to build reliable services and those who desperately need to manipulate those services for their own real-world gains. In a sense, it’s ideals vs. reality. Everyone wants a fair platform, but once a platform is pronounced fair, everyone wants to sneak around to get on top. Partially because they need to pay their mortgage, and partially because they (rightly) assume others are doing the same.

I hope the problem is solvable–this is what keeps me up at night.