Karma server

Projects
Participants	Becha
Skills	Programming, community building, open source projects, presenting
Status	Planning
Niche	Software
Purpose	World domination

Goal

Increase involvement in the "consensus building processes" that are the basis of grass-roots Internet governance model, by making the "barrier to entry" even lower.

Summary

• Karma server is intended for rating the mailing lists posts (and/or other "content"), with the goal to share the ratings with "friends", within one or more communities, and to enable search within posts.*

Introduction

Mailing lists are a (social media) tool for participatory decision making processes, enabling archived discussions with the goal of reaching a concensus. They are used for a very long time in this way in many different setups, from technical standardisation bodies (IETF, W3C), Internet governace (Regional Internet Registries, ICANN), technical communities (NOGs, e.g. NANOG, UKNOF, DENOG...), to community projects such as hackerspaces.

Enabling "tagging" of mailing-lists posts would introduce an improvement in the direction of more modern "social media", such as web-forums (slashdot, reddit) or other platforms where users can "rate" the content (Amazon, FB discussion groups).

"Tagging" is useful feature for several large communities that have many mailing lists (RIPE, NANOG, IETF); but also fo any smaller community (for example, hackerspace) that communicates via mailing lists. Using the karma server would lower the barrier for participation (since it is easier to rate "=1" or "-1" then to emial "mee too", or even more constructive post..).

Possible Implementation

Requirements

Possible implementation solution would need to:

• enable mail clients (and/or mailing list servers) do the ratings;
• interact with the karma server, to upload and download ratings;
• also to choose people whose ratings I want to follow;

TO DO

What needs to be done:

• write SW for karma server
• write patches that modify email clients
• promote the usage of this in several communities (29c3! ripe meeting, nanog meeting / lists, ietf...)
• write an RFC about it...
• maintain the "github" / open source repository of the SW

Similar implementations

• "slashdot" -- only on the web
• dig -- only on the web
• Facebook groups :(
• RIPE NCC has the rating of posts, on the closed web app, only for wg-chairs
• perlmonks.org (nice system that encourages voting)

People involved

• Becha
• Arnd
• Emile Aben

Hackathon at UnlikeUs #3

• Unlike Us! http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/unlikeus/3-amsterdam/

• Slides: File:karma-server-for-mailing-lists.6pp.pdf

Documentation

Results of the brainstorm discussion

Ideas:

• Use STMP instead of IMAP -- because it is easier to "hack" within one afternoon

• create a separate, custom-purpose mailing list that collects tags, and redistributes them to all subscribed (e.g. list-name-with-tags@mail-list-server.example.com)

list@server ----[message]---> client ---- [message + tag ] ---> +
         ^
         |--------------list-and-tags@server --------------------| 

Breaking up the huge project into smaller pieces:

• write a server-side script that adds "a tag" to one single message (tags = stars, or number,s or + / -)

• write an add-on for one client: to add a tag: in the extra header

• write a "button" for one client that "adds a tags, and forwards to another special-purpose list"

• write a client-side script that is showing tags/results and interprets results

• write a server-side engine that collects tags

• Relevant RFC that would have the be changed:

• Which IETF wg is relevant to send this to?

Examples of other implementations:

* Wisestamp
* OpenCRM
* RSS: SelfOSS
* RSS: Fidefieter? (Douwe?) 

* IMAP already has a way of handling tags? prioritisation?

Whiteboard

File:uu3-friday.JPG

Slides

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