h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

You don't seem to have many example of meritocracy on the 'net (just RPGs). One site which I think would qualify is Advogato (a .org-anization) where people can post news items about events, but your privilages are set by how people have voted for you. What 'level' you are currently on are controlled by a fancy algorithm and how people have voted for you.

"ZEAL" used to be a bit like that, with your priveleges controlled by how much you had contributed to the community and how other people saw you, as measured by "good / bad" votes.

Then Looksmart took it over, and just wiped everybody's points before changing the algorithm to award more points for thinking the way they liked...

I guess that's an example of a dictatorship masquerading as a democratic meritocracy... or something...

Speaking as a computer scientist, that's fascinating stuff. I've heard about these kinds of systems, but this is the first I've seen that's resistent to mass attack - the rest seem to be quite simple and easy to dupe.

Seems to me more like a new kind of democracy, though - one that could only ever work on the net. Meritocracy implies that ability gives you power - in advogato it seems that votes give you power, which I think is different...

It's possibly worth noting that the person who coined the word 'meritocracy' did so for a book, and that book was a satire. He wasn't actually proposing a meritocracy as viable system, but using it more as a warning

I heard that before - when Blair was busy praising Britain's meritocracy. As they say, truth is funnier than satire...

-MyRedDice

Lucinda said:
> Meritocracy implies that ability gives you power - in advogato it
> seems that votes give you power, which I think is different...

Yes, I see your point, I think one of the concepts of the advogato system was that votes should be given to people who did have ability, such as lead developers on open source projects. I don't know whether that has actually happened though.

The original "ZEAL" system was surprisingly subtle; for every action you performed on-site, such as adding a site to the directory or updating a site's description, you gained points. But, these actions also had a "rate this action" box attached, where each of the other users could score it as "Good" (+1 point) or "Bad" (-1 point). If you did something particularly good for the community, lots of users would add points to your total, while if you did something dumb or unproductive they would subtract points. Each user was limited to +/- 1 point for every action you performed, so no-one could "stuff the ballot-boxes". The only way that user votes could help or hinder you significantly was if you performed many "actions", which was generally a good thing anyway.

how did it deal with multiple accounts?

It didn't... To accrue "status", you needed to perform all your transactions through the same account. There were a *lot* of users (I got a couple of free tee-shirts for being one of the first 500 "Original Zealots" to sign up!), so anyone bothering to set up three or four accounts didn't really swing the balance of power to a detectable degree.