Re: The Object Primitive

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 11:19 AM, Roy Davies
<roy.c.davies@flexstudio.co.nz> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Interesting point.  This is something I've contemplated in my current implementation of POI, and come up with an idea built on the Maori concept of Mana.  Mana is a complex concept, but roughly means power, trust, strength, regardedness - those sorts of things, and is not something you get yourself, but is something conferred on you by your peers, family, greater family, public, etc.
>
> Mana can apply to people and things, and there are aspects like - an object owned by someone of high mana has in itself high mana, and your mana is the sum of the mana of you, your tribe, your family, your deeds, etc.  So a bad egg in the family can bring down everyone else's mana.
>
> So, what does this mean in the terms of POI - well, in my implementation, we are considering putting a level of Mana on on each point and person.  When a person of high mana creates   a point, this point has a higher mana level than a point created by someone with lower mana.  Further, points that people like, and approve of, increase in mana, and correspondingly, that person's mana increases.  Of course, the opposite is also true - if people, generally, disapprove of your POIs, then the point's mana drops, and so does yours.  A high level of mana is associated with trustworthiness in the system, and perhaps even access to certain parts of the system that others can't so easily get at.  And a low level of Mana means you might eventually get kicked out.
>
> Is this sensible and implementable?  Don't know yet, I'll let you when we implement it, and then how it tracks.

If these relations between people and their information remain forever
and remain being updated, I bet we could make money selling
visualization tools. Take some psychedelic colors for the viz, get
some people hooked on the concept so that the Mana starts flowing, and
we have the perfect mixture between an LSD trip and Facebook.
Guaranteed gold. Wonderful use case for video glasses too.

In all seriousness, I wonder how feasible it is to keep updating
everything. It seems to me the computational complexity explodes with
the number of points and the number of participants. Doing on-access
evaluation of a reasource's "Mana score" may introduce high latency,
destroying part of the experience. Proactive updating has the risk of
triggering a system-wide update storm. A propagation cutoff (dropping
Mana updates once the delta gets small) seems in order to limit the
extent of updates but that introduces the risk of introducing
unfairness, when 10 updates of 0.1 get dropped but 1 update of 1.0
comes through fully.

Still, interesting concept.

Regards,

Jens

Received on Tuesday, 15 February 2011 10:48:11 UTC