Drumbeat/p2pu/Assessment and Accreditation/Reputation Systems

Running collection of references and thoughts regarding possible reputation systems of use to P2PU, especially for the Web Craft curriculum.

If you are aware of some type of "reputation" system in use online, please add it here with as many notes and comments as you care to include. We will try to stay on top of this page and keep things somewhat organized, so no worries if your contribution looks messy.

Badges and Points

• HuffPost Badges
  • Huffington Post attempts to encourage engagement by site users with this badge system.
• Notemonk Points
  • Mechanism to recognize extent of user contributions to the Notemonk community.
• StackOverflow.com badge system
  • Massive aggregation of different tiered categories.
• O'Reilly Answers
  • Badge system for O'Reilly Tech School which can be collected and distinguish among different types of engagement tasks.
• Media Masters Digital Transcript - Flickr image
  • A project of the Global Kids Online Leadership Program.
• Boy Scouts of America merit badges
  • Long-standing system that awards badges for specific knowledge and accomplishments. If you accumulate sufficient numbers of different badges, you gain in rank.

User Ratings and Rankings

• Digg
  • Users digg postings - the most popular postings rise to the top.
• eBay
  • Seller ratings on eBay.
• Amazon
  • Several systems at play - user ratings (as stars and a five-point scale), user commentary, ratings of the reviews themselves, seller metrics, etc.
• Yelp, Zagat, Angie's List
  • Just a few examples of the many sites that aggregate basic user-generated scores (usually on a basic scale, such 1-5, worst to best) to generate a hierarchy.

Endorsing or Accrediting Agencies (offering seals of approval)

• Good Housekeeping Seal
  • Long-standing and well known brand that conveys some sort of confidence that the product actually does what it claims.
• National Organic Seal
  • Certification process behind the seal ensures that the agricultural practices employed to produce the food meet certain requirements. The seal retains high value in the marketplace, allowing organically certified products to command higher prices.
• W3Schools.com
  • Test-based (as a competency metric) form of certification.

Simple Web Metrics

• PageRank
  • PageRank and comparable page ranking algorithms are used as metrics of popularity, appropriateness, etc.
• Page views
  • Direct measure of the number of people viewing a specific web page, as a popularity measure. This can be further decomposed into unique page views, referrals, etc. This suite of web-browsing metrics is generally referred to as web analytics.

Others?