BlogSwap: Transparency Rapleaf by John Sumser

BlogSwap:  Week 2:  The following is a guest post by John Sumser of Interbiznet News.  John is a fixure in the firmament that is the online employment world.  He's been writing daily since 1994.   His post today is about one of my favorite blogs topics, Transparency.

Begin post: 

Auren Hoffman, a long time player in our industry, recently launched a company called Rapleaf. The firm is an online reputation index. "Buyers" and "Sellers" are encouraged to rate each other for broader public consumption. Complete with blog and online social scene, Rapleaf is a logical extension of the trend towards deep transparency.

Auren, who has always had his fingers in projects like KarmaOne (a pioneering job referral system), is deeply persuaded that a collective Good-Housekeeping seal of approval will be a part of doing business online. We are certain that reputation management services will be a critical component of our lives. Think of it as a peer generated credit report or a community based guide to people.

Everyone has seen the reputation management information in Amazon's shops. It boils down to evaluations of a given vendor by their customers. Here are some other examples of reputation management systems (from Wikipedia):

• Slashdot contains little original content, instead revolving around short reviews of content exterior to the site. "Karma" is Slashdot's name for reputation management. "Moderators" are able to vote on both reviews themselves and comments on those reviews in a system not too dissimilar from E2's. In a novel twist, votes are not merely "+1 point" or "-1 point"; moderators also attach one of a list of predefined labels, such as Flamebait or Informative.
• Meatball is a wiki devoted to discussion of online communities, including wikis themselves; thus, it is a "metawiki". Its membership is not large. Meatball permits anonymous users, but relegates them to an inferior status: "If you choose not to introduce yourself, it's assumed you aren't here to participate in exchanging help, but just to 'hang out.'"
• Everything2, like Wikipedia, is a general knowledge base. E2 manages user reputation strongly; one might say it is central to the project's paradigm. Each user's "writeup" carries its own score, or "vote" total. Users who read writeups are encouraged to vote on them; after voting, a user is shown the current score. There is a complicated system for totaling ratings and rewarding users whose writeups score highly; users who vote are also      rewarded.
• eBay The feedback system on eBay asks each user to post his opinion (positive or negative) on the person with whom he      transacted. Every place a user's system handle ("ID") is displayed, his feedback is displayed with it.

Rapleaf is interesting because the rating system is independent of any particular platform. You might call it open source reputation management. Since buyers and sellers inhabit a vast array of sites and universes, the Rapleaf view appears to be platform independence. A single repository of reputation information (hmm, will they spider Amazon and the others?) is a marketplace that can facilitate other markets.

Transparency is the essence of 21st Century organization and management. The twin engines of technology and demographics make it clear that lots of heretofore unused, unneeded and unavailable information will become a part of our economic, social and commercial processes. The things you buy, use, think, inhabit, operate or otherwise consume will come wrapped in an information envelope that makes its history and legacy very apparent.

Rapleaf makes us wonder about the overall Labor Market. With all of the emphasis on employee background checking and screening, it's a real surprise that no meaningful alternative has yet emerged for employees. Right now, it is easy to imagine a Rapleaf dedicated solely to organizations and Recruiters (by name). Given the magnitude of the employment decision, the data flows are very one sided in the current market.

There are naysayers who think that companies will be able to continue to refuse to buy from services that rate them. (This is a common view of the risk associated with some of Jobster's community services.) Imagine if job hunters started to refuse to work for companies that insisted on background checks. Transparency is good on both ends of the spectrum. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Here's a Microsoft College Recruiting video.

You can reach John at johnsumser.com

 

Comments

[steven Kempton]

I think Rapleaf is really interesting especially for recruiting. I am at this very moment in the process of trying to work out whether someone who has recently sent me a request to link on Linkedin is actually who they say they are. Without an actually phone number it is pretty hard to do that. And even if you do call them out, I expect they will just delete their profile and start up a new one. It would be nice to have something else to point to and say, here is my reputation for doing business.