A post on currency via twitter:

Some of you may know that I have roots in a community called Planetwork that has had an interest in ‘alternative’ currency and the role that digital identity could play a role in a emergent currency systems.

So, today my interest was peaked by this e-mail from Biz Stone at Twitter talking about an interesting new application being built on twitter.

http://www.identitywoman.net/twitter-and-emerging-currency

What is Identity?

Last week at the ITU-T meeting in Geneva there were some folks making the assertion that Identity was all about one’s credentials starting first and foremost with one’s birth certificate. Clearly credentials that are abstract representations of our selves have value in our world and let us do things that we were not able to do when identity was just social. Much like the fact
Hernando DeSoto points out in the Mystery of Capital that abstract representations of ownership of things (like deeds of ownership of houses – that say you own your house) has value because now you can do new things you couldn’t do before when ownership was just social (my neighbors know I own my house because I do – no piece of paper says this).

http://www.identitywoman.net/what-is-identity

And an older post.

Representational System Breakdown

cc: representational system breakdown – Hernando DeSoto & the Mystery of Captal
The below carbon copy mix up was in the same article as the Feinstein Article in the previous post. Really interesting and highlights the fragility of paper records that are still in abundance today. Again it highlights the challenge we have today – and explosion of records about ourselves. Every place we do business with. How do we manage this and know our ‘secrets’ are kept secrets.
Hernando DeSoto dives into the Mystery of Capital (I am reading the book now) and clearly articulates why it works in the west. We westerners don’t even see what it is and why it works because it just is. At the core are the representational systems that we use for things – the deeds for houses, the ownership of businesses etc. These documentation and representational systems are key to the efficient leverage and flow of capital. If we can succeed to new representational systems for people – persistent digital identity – the “big bang” comes in part from our being able to harness our own identities with a representation systems in new ways never before possible. …

Old IdentityWoman blog post

What do reputation and currencies have in common? They both exhibit patterns – acting as currency information between individuals and groups.

Eric Harris Braun, co-founder of the meta-currency project, core participant in the open money project, and E. F. Schumacher Society board member posted to the Berkman Center Law Lab:

Eric Harris Braun

Money, as a medium of exchange, a unit of measure, and a store of value is the primary information system that coordinates the flows of goods and services through the economy.

We might then say: Reputation — as tokens, achievement markers, certifications and many more — is the primary information system that coordinate the flows of trust through the social sphere.

To understand how deeply these two relate, we need a new expressive capacity claims Eric:

What is needed is the development of a new expressive capacity, what could be called a meta-currency language that allows the social organism to organically develop and express formal information systems tailored to enabling and interacting with all the different types of flows that comprise it. We can still call these information systems currencies because they are about shaping flows, or currents. However, these currencies will take on a huge variety of new forms tailored to the kind of value that they are helping to build. Note that this is not a call to “monetize” social well-being. Quite the opposite, it’s a call to understanding that money as currently practiced, inherently destroys many forms of social well being. But formal information systems can, in fact, build social well being, and we are actually quite familiar with them: reputation tokens, formal achievement markers like grades/credits & degrees, certification markers like USDA Organic, and many more. But as things stand, we haven’t recognized that all of these formal information systems are related families in a larger coherent pattern. We don’t see this, because we don’t yet have the necessary expressive infrastructure, the language, and grammars that unify the structure and forms these information systems take.

What do you believe is the intersection or overlap of reputation and currency?