Reputation at Work: Do You Linkup?

Anyone who's ever tried to coordinate a party, event, or other get-together knows how annoying it can be to get people to actually show up on time, if at all. For the person doing the planning, it's a hassle and can end up costing a bunch. For the attendees, they're left stranded with fewer people to talk and interact with, even worst than losing money is losing reputation.

An interesting little company has emerged providing Craigslist-like listings of events, with a twist. This new company, LinkUp, has sites across the states in the leading cities, though, as with Craigslist at first, the Californians seem to be the most progressive.

As there site reads:

Linkup Central favors reality over virtuality, real time over cybertime, and real human beings in the flesh over computer screens and typing.

The only purpose for these web sites is to help you find other human beings with whom you would like to travel on your own journey of life.

We wish you adventure, inspiration, knowledge, truth and growing wisdom on your journey.

What is most interesting about LinkUp, from my point of view, is the fuzzy reputation system that powers it. Here's another note from the site:

Each member has a reliability rating, based on a combination of their "flake factor" and the number of times they've RSVP'd compared to the number of times they've cancelled. Your reliability rating is visible to you, and visible to the host of an event for which you have RSVP'd, but not visible to anyone else.

Your reliability rating is, in effect, your social reputation within the group. You will definitely be judged by your reliability rating, and if you don't preserve that rating, you may find yourself excluded from some of the best events. We encourage you to carefully maintain and preserve your reliabiity rating.

We feel very strongly that this system is both necessary and ultimately helpful to everyone in the group, because we all want to have confidence in each other, and be part of a group we can all truly count on.

I think that there are numerous methods and measures of reputation available for our use. Certainly, this method might leave some room for improvement, but it definitely serves as a guideline worth factoring in during the decision-making and evaluation processes.

In general, though, it's quite interesting to see that reputation is taking the foreground in many new ventures.