12 July 2000

"Incidentally, Napster was Shawn Fanning's nickname in high school, after he got an extremely short haircut. Just in case, y'know, anyone was still wondering about that."

"rachel"

Let me say, right upfront, that I don't deserve to be on Advogato, and that all the people who have certified me as an "apprentice" are just being kind. (Thanks, people!) I use MacOS at home, Windows (gasp) at work and Linux only occasionally. My sole qualification for membership in the open-source community is that I enjoy the company of engineers very much, and seem to get on with them fairly well. It is, therefore, the height of cheek for me to keep a diary on Advogato, but I do.

Advogato -- it's a play on the word advocate, but the place is routinely called avocado or guacamole -- is an eight-month-old Web site designed to make life a little easier and more fun for free-software developers. It is both a community hangout where hackers cluster, jotting down daily tidbits of info in publicly accessible diaries, and a forum for discussion, like Slashdot. There's also an extra twist: On Slashdot, readers can rate the value of posts as part of a not-always-perfect filtering mechanism. But at Advogato, people rate one another.

Advogato has three elements: certificates -- apprentice, journeyer, master -- that measure your status in the community and that are awarded by members to other members; a Slashdot-like article feed, less frenzied but arguably much more thoughtful; and the diary-hosting feature. Thrown in almost as an afterthought, the diaries are by far the best part of the site. The "recent entries" page is particularly addictive. A compilation of the 10 or 20 freshest diary entries, haphazardly juxtaposed, it's a continually refreshing portrait of the free-software community, a gestalt dream journal, a gossip column, a webcam in prose.

Advogato was built by Raph Levien, a UC-Berkeley computer scientist, as part of his Ph.D. research into the gnarly problem of creating "webs of trust." There are two basic approaches to building such webs.

You can assemble a strict hierarchy with "God" at the top, authorizing the priests beneath him, who oversee the commoners beneath them in their turn. This is what VeriSign, the largest commercial encryption security company, has done. The company's model, in which it plays the role of God, corresponds closely to open-source evangelist Eric Raymond's idea of the "cathedral" style of software development, in which coders are coordinated from on high as part of a master plan. Cathedrals tend not to be popular in the free-software community, where everyone wants to do his own thing.

Advogato is an experiment in the alternative, peer-to-peer model, heavily inspired by Phil Zimmerman's Pretty Good Privacy site. "I found that the traditional trust metric framework was pretty limited, but discovered a new technique, which I call a group trust metric," Levien explains. "Basically, you put in a bunch of certificates of the form 'I, person A, vouch for the fact that person B is a member of this group,' and the trust metric tells you who it thinks is really in the group."

In other words, to qualify as a master on Advogato requires that the community of your peers agree that you're a hotshot.

12 July 2000

"chinese buffet for lunch, not the good one either. my stomach is kind of rumbling around in circles, i dont even want to look at the AIX failovers. oh well, back to work."

"spot"

What's revolutionary about Advogato's model is that like the Net itself -- and unlike VeriSign's top-down bureaucracy -- it's self-organizing, self-repairing and therefore hard to corrupt or otherwise compromise. "In all previous systems, once you get a certain number of wrong certificates, the whole thing falls apart," says Levien. In Advogato, at least in theory, the system should continue to function even if abuse is widespread. But his theory sounded too good to be true. Without hard evidence, Levien found, peer reviewers kept rejecting his papers.

At the same time, he was starting to feel the need for a community Web site for free-software developers. In spite of its efforts at moderation, Slashdot had become a victim of its own success, its signal-to-noise ratio infamously low. "It occurred to me that I could kill two birds with one stone, and build a community site that used the group trust metric to define the outline of the community," says Levien. "With these goals in mind, I started hacking like crazy, and Advogato was born." Article zero went up Nov. 6.

And suddenly, the hardcore hackers who had grown disillusioned with the venerable and increasingly creaky Slashdot had somewhere far more interesting to go. The latest stage in the evolution of online community had come to pass.

The Free Software Project
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