Well, the documentation still
doesn't mention the dimwit cert, but the recent diary by kelly is a 'sort-of explanation'.
(At least, it explains how she views the certs, and
thus
makes me comfortable with their social import: namely,
none :). ) Of course, she's also changed her cert to
Aprentice now, so the issue is a bit moot at this point.
Certification Weaknesses
It would be interesting to see a discussion of the
weaknesses of the certification system used here. I've
been mulling over the concept, but I'm not ready to point
out any real weaknesses yet. While the system does seem
interesting in its ability to prevent external attack, I'd
be interested to know the behavior of the system under
internal division (i.e. the result of phk's article on Romeo & Juliet). I think a
vulnerability of the current system may be that the
seeds are too closely related. Given a small project
(Jabber perhaps?) that
is only loosely connected to the seeds, revocation of those
few certs by irrate readers could decertify the entire
group. What concerns me most
about this possibility is the (possibly great)
number of members of the sub-group who are not
participating in the 'war' and could be decertified for no
reason.
This certainly seems to indicate that not only is dense
certification necessary, but that mature/lenient attitudes
should be taken by those who certify others. Perhaps raph's comments about dense
certification graphs have caused people to be overly
enthusiastic with their certifications. Once they become
more familiar with the people they have certified, they
desire to 'de-certify' the person (hence reclassifying
people like phk as dimwits).
My personal opinion is that the certs should be based on
contributions to OSS and not the person's latest article.
What particularly concerns me is not the people who
certified phk as dimwit without knowing much about him,
it's the people who had certified him as something else and
changed their cert to dimwit because of the article
he posted. If you thought phk's contributions to the OSS
community where good enough for a cert before, why did the
article suddenly change your mind? While the article could
have been better tailored to the audience and phk's
intended point, it certainly wasn't enough to erase his
prior contributions to the community.
Maybe I'm just overlooking the role of petty politics and
personal revenge in Advogato's system; the funny thing is
I thought politics and revenge didn't really belong there
to start with. Formal systems can never solve the trust
problem in its social context, and this is probably one of
the few forums that the members are qualified to understand
that weakness and thus self-moderate their behavior to
compensate for it.