Galapag.us!
We need tools to grow and defend our reputations and identities.

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Ben Turner, Discoverer

Ben Turner is a student at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program.

He is a former US Army paratrooper sergeant providing military intelligence Arabic crypto-linguist support to a Special Forces unit. He was a junior Yahoo!/Institute for the Study of Diplomacy fellow at Georgetown University, studying openness and closedness in the BRIC countries, as part of his Master's of Science in Foreign Service program. He studied international development (helping reduce poverty). He worked as a social media operations analyst and team lead while in DC.

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screenshot of the main profile screen screenshot of the evolution editor screen

Galapag.us provides you with a persistent identity (and therefore a reputation) online. It is an open social knowledge platform similar to Wikipedia, Facebook, Global Integrity, Amazon, and the stock market.

It compiles social data about your life so that you can compare those statistics against each other and against other people. Imagine if you could observe and analyze your life more objectively and statistically, the way governments can analyze their gross domestic product or employment numbers.

It will catalog every person in the world, allowing anyone to contribute information about a person, alive or dead, in hopes of remembering multiple facets and perceptions of a person, for mankind's posterity. We intend to remember past heroes, reward good behavior, bring awareness of those who have been "disappeared" by others. We intend to give context to the faceless names we gloss over daily.

One key metric, as a result of this information, will be the value of the difference in what someone says about himself and what others say about him. What are the traits of people who are misperceived, versus people who are seen as "genuine"?

Much of the data will be compared to time, since the one restraint all humans and objects share, since education and income and class and other factors can differ but not be total determinants of outcome, is time. We are all constrained to what we can do within the 24 hours in a day.

    Our start-up values:
  • We believe in sharing.
  • We believe in transparency.
  • We believe in generativity.
  • We believe in clouds of people reinforcing each others' information.
  • We believe in honesty.
  • We believe in economic incentives and positive externalities.
  • We believe in bootstrapping.
  • We believe in the Internet.
  • We believe in being fast and adaptive.
    Our ultimate goals:
  • We will become the standard for the world's 21st century reputation system.
  • We will give every human on Earth (and his internet of things) a reputation and identity.
  • We're going to tackle wage data across sectors.
  • We will quantify the qualitative.
  • We will make social data and social capital household phrases.
  • We will be the example of open social information.
  • We will provide the model for transparency.
  • We will provide direct democracy.
  • We will organize everyone's personal data.
Who's who in the identity and reputation layer community.

Cory Doctorow was European Affairs Coordinator for the EFF for 4 years and wrote "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" and "Little Brother". In the former, he describes whuffie (a Galapag.us-like system), a "constantly updated rating that measures how much esteem and respect other people have for you." (link)

Chris Messina helped create the co-working movement of shared workspaces and is now a chief proponent and advocate for OpenID and OAuth, which allow sites to share login credentials more securely. Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb had a nice write-up of him when he got hired at Google.

John Clippinger is a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He "directed multi-disciplinary research and workshops to explore the impact of trust, reciprocity, reputation, social signaling on the formation of digital institutions." He is the author of the book "A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity".

Tara Hunt worked on BarCamps and the co-working movement of shared workspaces and is the author of the book "The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business".




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