Some initial notes on repute, more detail will follow:

Why Repute?

Repute is a response to the problems of IRC channel management faced by smallish, peer-oriented channels. It is an a attempt to use technology to allow the opinions and moires of the channel determine acceptable behavior in a more or less organic fashion, and to identify opinion leaders by natural common assent and active community participants. The initial idea was inspired by perigrin's Bender, a trust-based "op bot". It's elegant, egalitarian interface gave rise to the thought process leading to repute.

Reputation-based Channel Management

The essential idea behind repute is the granting of privledges through community concensus. Repute provides channel management functions (mode changes such as +v, +o, +b, etc., as well as topic changes) through a public interface (PRIVMSG to the channel). It provides various levels of access to these functions based on the "trustiness" of the person requesting them. Trustiness is determined by a score we call "reputation".

A user's reputation is based on an identity, so for networks that don't offer nick registration repute provides that service. Repute then keeps a running reputation score for each identity (which may be several nicks and hosts, but is always one person). Reputation scores are generated by explicit and implicit behavior of TRUSTED community members. Repute listens to channel traffic and gleans information relevant to reputation.

The explicit component of reputation involves "karma". A long-standing practice of "incrementing" and "decrementing" people, things and ideas in the context of an IRC channel. In the case of repute, karma has a more formal role, though it is intended to be as close to the "natural" use as possible. Repute's karma commands look like:

More Gory Details

* DesignIdeas to capture thoughts on it might all be made to work