Advogato is an online community site dedicated to free software development, created by Raph Levien. It describes itself as "the free software developer's advocate."

Advogato's trust metric

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The motivating idea for Advogato was to try out in practice Levien's ideas about attack resistant trust metrics, having users certify each other in a kind of peer review process and use this information to avoid the abuses that plague open community sites. Levien observed that his notion of attack resistant trust metric was fundamentally very similar to the PageRank algorithm used by Google to rate article interest.

The implementation of this trust metric is through an Apache module called mod_virgule. mod_virgule is free software, licensed under the GPL and written in C. It is used by several websites other than Advogato.

There is a wiki, called AdvoWiki that applies Levien's theory to sort wiki pages by interest level.

See also

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• Everything2
• Kuro5hin
• Slashdot

References

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• Rusty Foster, 2004. 'User Sponsorship and Managed Growth'. Kuro5hin article.

External links

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• http://www.advogato.org/ -- Advogato home page
• http://wiki.slowass.net/?AdvoWiki -- AdvoWiki site
• http://advogato.org/proj/mod_virgule/ -- mod_virgule project page

Free software websites | Community websites | Reputation management