Our February Developer Spotlight shines on Vicente J. Ruiz Jurado who has been working on a couple of projects for Google Wave:
Both of these extensions have a social overtone to them and are quite ingenious and certainly not what you normally see being done by developers.
Let’s first look at Troco (which I could only access on the Google Wave Developer Sandbox and not the “September 09″ released Google Wave Preview):
Vicente explains that Troco means barter in Interlingua and in Português. Also, troc means barter in French and Català. He explains that Troco is:
An experimental peer-to-peer currency system. Troco is a set of wave extensions that aims to provide a decentralized complementary community currency system, i.e., a peer-to-peer currency system. You can also view it as an IOU or promissory note based system. At the current point, troco consists only in an experimental (unfinished and insecure) Wave gadget with a toolbar installer. For more info visit:http://troco.ourproject.org
Vicente also offers, a quote from Complementary Currencies in Japan Today, 2004 to help explain why this extension will become useful:
«Japan isn’t dealing with a “Japanese crisis” as is typically described in the Western media, but rather with a structural world crisis that chronologically happens to have first hit Japan.(…) We can expect the US to follow a similar path of denial particularly in an election year, repeating the mantra that the Japanese have heard for fourteen years: “next year, the economy will be back to normal.” It is under this light that what is going on in Japan in the domain of complementary currencies is relevant for the rest of the world. The second largest economy of the world has turned itself into a real-life laboratory for resolving a variety of economic and social problems from the bottom up, thanks to monetary innovations. Can the rest of the world afford not to learn from those experiments?»
Thus, Troco is heavily inspired in the japanese WAT and i-WAT Systems.
Given the Global economic crisis Troco’s time may indeed have arrivied. But first Vicente has some work to still do on the extension to get it working properly:
A brief of things to work on / study:
- Make the gadget more robust
- Improve the use of FireGPG (advanced users)
- Study the implementation of debt circulation
- Study the evolution of wave and how can this improve this project
We wish him good luck! I for one certainly hope he gets both this extension and the underlying idea surrounding Troco into the mainstream. It is more than time for new ideas when it comes to our barter system (or….is that what got is into this problem in the first place).
Next is Karma. Vicente describes Karma as:
Karma adds a simple rating Gadget to Waves, allowing participants of a Wave to rate each other. It also allows the expulsion and prohibition of users that have a low Karma from the Wave.i.e. if a user has been rated repeatedly with a low Karma and tries to enter a Wave with the checkbox “Kick out low-Karma participants” activated, the user will not be allowed to enter the Wave. Note: The kickout function is implemented, but will not work until remove_participant operation is in the API.
If you want to see Karma in action check out the demo Wave, which is available in the Google Wave Preview Edition.
Vicente goes on to add:
In the background, the overall Karma of Wave users is calculated using the Trust Metric algorithm from www.advogato.org.
If you want to use Karma, just add karma-bot@appspot.com to a Wave, and rate other participants. The more participants rate each other, the more accurate the global rate calculation becomes.
Short-term
- Improve interface to be able to support Waves with a lot of participants.
- Add a button to remove a rating.
Middle/Long term
- Study, choose and integrate a distributed reputation algorithm instead of the centralized algorithm.
Again, another great extension that is very interesting in terms of applying meaning to your social Karma rating. Not sure how popular that would be, but I certainly think that some of the underlying technology and thinking regarding the Karma extension could have some applicability in Black-Listing undesirable users who are intent on malicious actions. See the Google Wave User Black List post for more on that subject.
So hats off to Vicente! You are doing great work and I hope you continue to develop for Google Wave. Your work is both original and meaningful! Congradulations on being choosen for our February Developer Spotlight.
Please share your thoughts and encouragement for Vicente by leaving a comment below. We love to hear from you and your thoughts on this any post. What do you think of Vicente’s extension? Pretty cool, eh?
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