An appropriate reputation system is essential for any application that has a community and aims to provide an insight into the reputation and authority of members within the community but where to start…

In the blog post: Whuffie: Social Capital and Winning with Online Communities, “reputation” was introduced as a key to success for a start-up business but also an essential component to any "social networking" business that relies on its members having an element of "kudos" in terms of a "reputation system".

Kathy Sierra’s tweet “Biz culture based on helping users learn might trump one based on learning *from* or *about* users. Former implies latter, reverse not true.” got me thinking more about reputation and how that could be used to help users learn by building peer trust within a community.

There are many different models or design patterns established for building and conveying reputation but selecting the appropriate one is not easy, especially with a diverse, fragmented, community where some networks may be well defined and established and others in flux or chaotic.

Wikipatterns has some great people and adoption patterns and anti patterns that provide a starting point:

• IdentifyMatters - This pattern is based on the idea that people are more likely to take their contributions seriously and put more care into what they write when their identity is associated with it.
• Recognition – This pattern provide mechanisms that recognise the value added to the community by contributors.

Another great emerging source of design patterns is the Designing Social Interfaces patterns wiki established as a means to collect feedback prior to the publishing of an associated book. This wiki provides some great “Social Patterns & Best Practices” and the patterns relating to reputation, recommendations, and relationships (including terminology) are particularly relevant.

Looking at the reputation patterns there are some familiar “incentive” based patterns that encourage engagement and participation and these patterns combined with people recommendations displayed publicly with clear definitions  certainly provide a good foundation to build a reputation system upon:

Going back to Kathy’s tweet a reputation system that instils confidence, trust, relevance and authority whilst establishing a culture where all users learn from one another has got to be a benevolent one that provides tangible business benefits?