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For all the happiness and sharing, real money is involved here. In July GitHub received $100 million from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. This early in most software companies’ lives, $20 million would be a fortune.

GitHub’s popularity has also made it an important way for companies to recruit engineers, because some of the best people in the business are showing their work or dissecting the work of others inside some of the public pull requests.

Mr. Preston-Werner thinks the way open source requires a high degree of trust and collaboration among relative equals (plus a few high-level managers who define the scope of a job and make final decisions) can be extended more broadly, even into government.

“For now this is about code, but we can make the burden of decision-making into an opportunity,” he said. “It would be useful if you could capture the process of decision-making, and see who suggested the decisions that created a law or a bill.”

Can this really be extended across a large, complex organization, however?

As complex as an open-source project may be, it is also based on a single, well-defined outcome, and an engineering task that is generally free of concepts like fairness and justice, about which people can debate endlessly.

Google once prided itself on few managers and fast action, but has found that getting big can also involve lots more meetings.

Still, these fast-rising successes may be on to something more than simply universalizing the means of their own good fortune. An early guru of the Information Age, Peter Drucker, wrote often in the latter part of his career of the need for managers to define tasks, and for workers to seek fulfillment before profits.

At the heart of Movenbank is a concept call CRED.

The difference today is our ability to capture data from across an array of digital services. With every trade we make, comment we leave, person we "friend", spammer we flag or badge we earn, we leave a trail of how well we can or can't be trusted.

An aggregated online reputation having a real-world value holds enormous potential

peer-to-peer marketplaces, where a high degree of trust is required between strangers; and where a traditional approach based on disjointed information sources is currently inefficient, such as recruiting.

opportunity to reinvent the way people found jobs through online reputation

"It's not about your credit, but your credibility," King says.

But this wealth of data raises an important question -- who owns our reputation? Shouldn't our hard-earned online status be portable? If you're a SuperHost on Airbnb, shouldn't you be able to use that reputation to, say, get a loan, or start selling on Etsy?

"People are currently underusing their networks and reputation," King says. "I want to help people to understand and build their influence and reputation, and think of it as capital they can put to good use."

Social scientists have long been trying to quantify the value of reputation.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers monitored brain activity

"The implication of our study is that different types of reward are coded by the same currency system." In other words, our brains neurologically compute personal reputation to be as valuable as money.

Personal reputation has been a means of making socioeconomic decisions for thousands of years. The difference today is that network technologies are digitally enabling the trust we used to experience face-to-face -- meaning that interactions and exchanges are taking place between total strangers.

Trust and reputation become acutely important in peer-to-peer marketplaces such as WhipCar and Airbnb, where members are taking a risk renting out their cars or their homes.

When you are trading peer-to-peer, you can't count on traditional credit scores. A different measurement is needed. Reputation fills this gap because it's the ultimate output of how much a community trusts you.

Welcome to the reputation economy, where your online history becomes more powerful than your credit history.

Presently, reputation data doesn't transfer between verticals.

A wave of startups, including Connect.Me, TrustCloud, TrustRank, Legit and WhyTrusted, are trying to solve this problem by designing systems that correlate reputation data. By building a system based on "reputation API" -- a combination of a user's activity, ratings and reviews across sites -- Legit is working to build a service that gives users a score from zero to 100. In trying to create a universal metric for a person's trustworthiness, they are trying to "become the credit system of the sharing economy", says Jeremy Barton, the 27-year-old San Francisco-based cofounder of Legit.

His company, and other reputation ventures, face some big challenges if they are to become, effectively, the PayPal of trust. The most obvious is coming up with algorithms that can't be easily gamed or polluted by trolls. And then there's the critical hurdle of convincing online marketplaces not just to open up their reputation vaults, but create a standardised format for how they frame and collect reputation data. "We think companies will share reputation data for the same reasons banks give credit data to credit bureaux," says Rob Boyle, Legit cofounder and CTO. "It is beneficial for one company to give up their slice of reputation data if in return they get access to the bigger picture: aggregated data from other companies."

PeerIndex, Kred and Klout,

are measuring social influence, not reputation. "Influence measures your ability to drag someone into action,"

"Reputation is an indicator of whether a person is good or bad and, ultimately, are they trustworthy?"

Early influence and reputation aggregators will undoubtedly learn by trial and error -- but they will also face the significant challenge of pioneering the use of reputation data in a responsible way. And there's a challenge beyond that: reputation is largely contextual, so it's tricky to transport it to other situations.

Many of the ventures starting to make strides in the reputation economy are measuring different dimensions of reputation.

reputation is a measure of knowledge

a measure of trust

a measure of propensity to pay

measure of influence

Reputation capital is not about combining a selection of different measures into a single number -- people are too nuanced and complex to be distilled into single digits or binary ratings.

It's the culmination of many layers of reputation you build in different places that genuinely reflect who you are as a person and figuring out exactly how that carries value in a variety of contexts.

The most basic level is verification of your true identity

reliability and helpfulness

do what we say we are going to do

respect another person's property

trusted to pay on time

we will be able to perform a Google- or Facebook-like search and see a picture of a person's behaviour in many different contexts, over a length of time. Slivers of data that have until now lived in secluded isolation online will be available in one place. Answers on Quora, reviews on TripAdvisor, comments on Amazon, feedback on Airbnb, videos posted on YouTube, social groups joined, or presentations on SlideShare; as well as a history and real-time stream of who has trusted you, when, where and why. The whole package will come together in your personal reputation dashboard, painting a comprehensive, definitive picture of your intentions, capabilities and values.

idea of global reputation

By the end of the decade, a good online reputation could be the most valuable currency in your possession.