Often I struggle to find the right words for my posts … just to discover that someone else already wrote with a brilliant and remarkable style about the very same stuff that I’m mumbling about.

It’s the case of my previous post “Identity is not reputation” confronted with James Kobielus post “imho identity privacy reputation” (November 2005).

He wrote:

Reputation isn’t an identity, credential, permission, or role. It isn’t exactly an attribute, in the same sense that, say, your birth date or hair color are attributes. And it isn’t something you claim any privacy protection over—it’s the exact opposite: the court of public opinion over which you have no sovereignty and little direct control.

In the identity management context, reputation is more of an assurance or trust level—an evaluation of the extent to which someone is worthwhile to know and associate with.

I would just make minor changes to the following paragraphs:

Reputation is relying parties’ evaluation of our reliability, of their liabilities, and of the degree to which associating with us makes them ill at ease.

Relying parties —- the ultimate policy decision and enforcement points in any interaction —- need many levels of assurance if they’re going to do business with us. They gather assertions and data from many “authorities” (authentication authorities, attribute authorities, etc.) before rendering their evaluations and opening their kimonos.

I would consider those cases where the relying parties are not able to gather all the assertions or make the evaluation of the reputation by themselves.

(This is exactly the situation where blogger Bob has to evaluate Alice’s reputation in order to automatically accept or reject her comment to his post. See our revised proposal of a reputation system for blog comments.)