Some interesting discussion about trust metrics have arisen since bagder posted the advogato stats. I'm bemused by the Linux vs BSD stuff - I guess the BSD crowd are seen as outsiders which they were, but I see that lilo deliberately formed an alliance by identifying Masters in the BSD community and certifying them directly to that level.

It seems I am a beneficiary of that alliance as many of the people who have certified me are involved with BSD. ovec points out that you can have 5 apprentice certifications and still be observer hey that's me!Ovec also notes that a sociological factor may also be operating which I suspect is also true. I've been working with computers (on and off) since 1978, I'm really not that keen on becoming an apprentice, but then I'm an outsider and <admission>commercial software developer</admission> no-one here knows me, and there may be other things about my contributions that set me apart. But I agree, it is odd that it seems difficult to make apprentice, but easy to make journeyer.

Well, I'm continuing my experiment with advogato. I've been considering projects that I can initiate etc. At present my biggest (almost open source) contribution is Te Pukapuka Kura Maori which is a 19th century Maori language school reader that I laboriously typed and placed on the web. I've talked elsewhere about my plans to do some development work on advogato and an RTF to web application based on style sheets. I've installed one of the alpha releases of advogato on my test server, but I haven't got it going yet. (The module is listed on server-info, but the <location> returns zero-length data to my browser).