Get your Whuffie on - Social Reputations

Our friend Tara Hunt was in Montreal in December doing some research for her upcoming book and visited Akoha.  Her book The Whuffie Factor - 5 Keys for Maxing Social Capital and Winning with Online Communities is coming this fall.

If you aren’t familiar with the term Whuffie, you’ll be hearing more about it in the coming year.  It is available for pre-order at Amazon today.

Whuffie is a reference to a reputation-based currency in Cory Doctorow’s sci-fi novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. (the book is available for free, but I encourage you to buy a copy or order a signed copy directly from Cory).

Wikipedia explains Whuffie in the following way,

The usual economic incentives have disappeared from the book’s world. Whuffie has replaced money, providing a motivation for people to do useful and creative things. A person’s Whuffie is a general measurement of his or her overall reputation, and Whuffie is lost and gained according to a person’s favorable or unfavorable actions. The question is, who determines which actions are favorable or unfavorable? In Down and Out, the answer is public opinion. Rudely pushing past someone on the sidewalk will definitely lose you points from them (and possibly bystanders who saw you), while composing a much-loved symphony will earn you Whuffie from everyone who enjoyed it.

……..

There are few details in the book about how this system actually worked; most of the explanations given are very general, like this one: "Whuffie recaptured the true essence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn’t starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented — your personal capital with your friends and neighbors — you more accurately gauged your success".

The idea that our daily activities could be combined into a social score or social economy is already occurring in Facebook, multi-player games, the blogosphere and many other communities.  Making it fun for people to accumulate social reputations in the context of play is one of the ideas we’ve incorporated into Akoha.

Our study of gift economies have been one of the many inspirations for themes and activities in Akoha.  When designing the rewards and mechanics of how Akoha works we looked to many different concepts of gift culture to inspire our team.