it's a trip to read raph's overview of advogato and think about the experience of using advogato. for him, it's an immersive experiment with implications as to how he sees applied mathematics. it's a microcosm of humanity and relationships. i remember coming to advogato and thinking, "oh, so people rate each others' progress and the goal is to get to the top." so i forage in, rating entire villages with casual glances at their worth. my judgements were all based on the diary entries. one user who magnetized me was ReadMe. i could appreciate the verse. i rated him/her, he/she rated me equally. apparently it's ReadMe's standing policy. the problem with rating based on writing is that your trust network builds around a loose group of writers who can appreciate each other, but don't really know each other or communicate at all. nothing to build much trust on. then i joined the yaml project and noticed that cce keeps a diary here. knowing clark from yaml development, we rated each other based on a deeper knowledge of each other's skills. clark's rating me as journeyer is meaningful in a way that other ratings simply aren't. so then i begin to see advogato through raph's eyes. the trust metric diagrams make more sense in context. so here's a suggestion for building trust on advogato: (someone should write a guide) build trust with individuals you trust in life. bring them to advogato and rate each other, link to each other. your team's real trust in each other should translate into trust metrics here. of course, you will then need to seek trust from the good nodes of advogato. i don't know if receiving trust from stragglers on recentlog (such as myself) will pollute your value. i'd seek other masters and journeyers online who work on related projects and could see the value of your work. e-mail them? tell them you're seeking trust on advogato and are looking for peer review? or pitch in on one of their projects and prove your worth. (it looks like alan has got this sort of idea going on with his mother certifying him. and as fun as it would be to certify a first-grader, i should probably avoid spreading my compromised status until i find a way out. :D) it's hard to say how much value being a master on advogato actually holds at this time, though. you don't accumulate services or access beyond the rating itself. i'm not saying the rating doesn't hold value on its own, it's just easier for me to rate other people high because i say to myself, "well, it's just a rating." i guess the beauty of the system is that advogato likely considers me a compromised node since i've had such a lackadaisical approach to certifying. good luck on the talk, raph. twould be fun to attend. and congrats to bytesplit for being the anomaly.