Re: creating a decentralized web of trust

On 25 July 2015 at 21:34, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:

> I've been working lately on creating an identity provider based on the
> github API
>
> In weaving the web, timbl wrote: "The trust engine is the most powerful
> sort of agent on the Semantic Web" and Im trying to look for ideas on how
> to create such a thing.  Note also that this group incorporated the web of
> trust group some time back.  I think when reading and writing to the web
> it's going to be increasingly important to know whether or not you can
> trust someone with write access.
>
> So, Github provides a number of social signals:
>
> - followers
> - date joined
> - link to email/homepage
> - repositories you are a member of
> - project contributions
> - how many of your projects are starred
> - how frequently you have worked
>
> And a few more.  I am looking to see how to combine these facts to get a
> signal score between 0% - 100% as a rough rating, which I can then publish.
>
> My algorithm so far is quite basic so far, and only a starting point
>
> I multiply the #followers * 3 up to a maximum of 30 followers.  e.g.
>
> http://gitpay.org/torvalds -- 90%
> http://gitpay.org/stratus -- 9 followers = 27%
>
> I am looking for ideas on how to improve this algorithm, or maybe find a
> set of algorithms people can choose from to get out a trust score (however
> i am scpetical people will have time to code them).
>
> The other problem I see is.  You could have a great reputation on twitter,
> but only 1-2 followers on github that would then not be indicative of
> overall trust.
>
> One question I've been thinking about is "should older accounts be trusted
> more than new ones?"
>
> Would be interested if there were any thoughts on this.
>

This paper from facebook offers some interesting insights:

http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol8/p1804-ching.pdf