There must have been some large ripple in the trust web,
because everybody's talking about it now. Like everyone
else, I have an opinion about the trust web, and this is it:
What I seem to be noticing is that 3 or 4 Apprentices who
know each other in some way will cert each other as
Journeyer, either honestly or because they just want to.
None of them get Journeyer out of it yet, but it creates a
relationship "subnet" which, as soon as one of them gets a
Journeyer cert from a qualified Journeyer outside the
subnet, wham! they all get Journeyer immediately. And
there's nothing stopping any of them from being in multiple
subnets so the effect might ripple thru several such
"relationship
subnets."
Of course this may not be a bad thing if you regard the
trust web in its purest form, that's how it's supposed to
work, but it sure seems to contribute to "cert inflation."
I think it would be interesting, in the name of
experimentation, to
require two certs from senior members (nodes, whatever) in
order to get a higher cert. This would certainly raise the
bar for relationship subnets as described above, because it
would take three certs from outside the subnet to raise the
entire subnet, as opposed to one. It would also dampen the
ripple effect among people who bridge subnets.
Example: Aaron, Bob, and Chuck are Apprentices who cert each
other as Journeyer. Aaron then gets two external certs as
Journeyer so he is now officially a Journeyer, but Bob and
Chuck are not because they still need another cert in
addition to Aaron's. If Bob gets an external cert then,
combined with Aaron's cert, he is now a Journeyer. Aaron's
and Bob's certs then automatically promote Chuck to
Journeyer. The subnet is now self-sustaining to the
Journeyer level, any number of their buddies can join and
they have enough Journeyers to promote anyone. If Bob is
also part of a second such subnet, his promotion would
not by itself create a ripple effect in that
subnet, it would still require another external cert.
Applying discrete math to social relationships is kind of
creepy.
In other news, I put xload-snmp on freshmeat and watched the
hits roll in. See, I was conducting a little experiment
where for a while I only had xload-snmp mentioned on
Advogato. I found that I got one or two hits consistently
each time I made a diary entry, and none besides. So that
provides circumstantial evidence as to what is Advogato's
main communication channel. But we already knew that, right?
We bought Midtown Madness for my son last week, and now we
all play it. It's a lot of fun, especially if you are at all
familiar with Chicago. I'm not really into driving games,
but I like tearing around downtown Chicago at 120+ mph.
Hey, what time zone is Advogato in, anyway?