[svlug] upcoming presentation at Google

[Leslie Hawthorn]

Hello SVLUG (Paul :),

If you feel it is appropriate, please extend this invitation to SVLUG.
Please ask folks to pass the invitation along to anyone they feel would be
interested.

Please join us on Monday, June 25th for the next instance of the Open Source
Developers @ Google Speaker Series.  Raph Levien, the founder of the
Advogato website, will discuss "Lesson from Advogato."  There is no cost for
admission and refreshments will be served.  More logistics information here:
http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2007/06/open-source-developers-google-speaker_15.html

Talk Abstract:

Advogato is a community blog for free software developers, founded in 1999
as a testbed for ideas on attack-resistant trust metrics. The site now has
13k registered users, of whom over 3000 are ranked with one of the
"Apprentice", "Journeyer", or "Master" certifications. Though I neglected
the maintenance of the site for many years, it has retained an active
community, and is seeing significant new life since it was handed over to
the new maintainer, Steven Rainwater.

By the exponential-growth standards of the dot-com boom, Advogato has been
only a modest success. Yet, the experience of the site over the years
contains a number of lessons. First and foremost, attack-resistant trust
metrics do work. The site succeeds in being remarkably spam-free, as well as
completely open to the worldwide community of free software developers, and
achieves these goals without needing a huge amount of manual input to delete
spammers.

Thus, the main lesson is that trust metrics do work, but they need to be
applied with care. Experience with the site teaches the importance of
choosing and implementing the appropriate trust metric for the assumptions
at hand. There is widespread "cert inflation," where many users are ranked
higher than the guidelines would recommend. The trust metrics also did not
bring a flow of very high quality articles to the front page.

Another important lesson is that openness and transparency work. The
workings of the trust metric (including the complete source code) is public.
Thus, Advogato strongly refutes the prevailing wisdom that secrecy is needed
for spam protection. This lesson is similar to the ineffectiveness of
"security through obscurity".

Lastly, I'll spend some time discussing why Advogato failed to catch fire in
the public's imagination, despite its qualities. Possible factors include
lack of promotion, and fact that the trust metrics were never tested against
real money.
Speaker Bio:
Raph Levien has been active in the free software / open source community for
13 years, with a range of contributions including email crypto, 2d graphics,
fonts, various components in the Gnome framework, and, for most of the last
seven years, Ghostscript. Before then, he built the free software community
website Advogato as a proving ground for his ideas on trust metrics and
attack-resistant reputation systems. He has recently joined Google as an
engineer working on combatting spam and abuse.

Thank you,
LH


-- 
Leslie Hawthorn
Program Manager - Open Source
Google Inc.
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