I just wanted to say that I at least consider SqP (or something like it) to be a very important experiment.
To do various things (such as elections) as a community, we need mechanisms (voting). Whenever the things we want to do have a chance of being important, we need our mechanisms to take account of trust in some way.
Most traditional ways of handling trust (membership lists, payments, ...) simply *suck* in the sense of requiring lots of centralized manual work. SqP, while requiring some work of newcomers and the users that certify them, is not creating that work, but just spreading it around.
It also has the advantage that it has a chance of scaling, and by its nature it allows us to spread trust relatively quickly, while protecting us somewhat against a possible hostile takeover. IIRC, there's an API to it, so other applications can reuse the same effort for completely different purposes. All of these latter advantages are somewhat iffy - that's the experiment.
But it has a better chance of working in these ways than other methods we've found on the elections list, and it definitely allows us to decentralize the work of managing trust, preventing the elections process from being so much of a chore nobody wants to do it.
So please do use it. Do not feel embarrassed about asking for certification, its a result of the mechanism we chose, not your own ego. Do give people solid reasons to certify you - they want to do justice to the trust invested in them, so point at your projects, interests and so forth. And in turn, if anyone you know joins the community, go ahead and certify them proactively.
Thanks, Daniel Vainsencher
Ken Causey wrote:
On Tue, 2007-02-20 at 23:44 +0100, karl wrote:
I went trough the list of Observers and certified a few that had some info. It would be nice to have a date the person created their account. karl
Thanks for taking the time.
Earlier today someone else (perhaps it was you then) requested changes to SqP. Here's the deal: SqP is an instance of Advogato and is built on top of an Apache1 module (mod_virgule). It's C code. Frankly no one here wants to touch it. Redoing this site in Squeak has been long discussed. But frankly there are a lot of things to do and few available hours.
But anyone who is interested in re-implementing SqP in Squeak (or something of similar functionality) is more than welcome to do so. And if it is any good at all I suspect we will be happy to transfer over.
Ken