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
>   
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>