The Trust Exchange utilizes the network of trust relationships that already exist, making them visible, interlinked and actionable.  Most of our decisions are based on collective opinions and discernment, particularly those of friends we trust.  The Trust Exchange brings visibility to your friends’ ratings of products, companies, websites, and more.  In turn, you can rate your trust level of a friend or information source in any category, where categories are simply user-created tags.  One friend you may trust for their computer knowledge and another for their culinary capacity.

The Trust Exchange amalgamates existing ratings from any source, feeding them into an open platform.  Instead of owning your ratings and trust information, like existing online networks and organizations, the Trust Exchange is a simple and powerful open platform for humanity to exchange its trust information.  Individuals can choose whether to make ratings publicly available, or share them privately with trusted friends.

The purpose of the Trust Exchange is to support and facilitate the era of transparency that is emerging.  Anyone doing research on a purchase can tap into the publicly available ratings of relevant companies to help them choose a product or supplier aligned with their own values.  Corporations, too, can become model citizens when social capital is tied closely enough to revenue.  The engine of capitalism then becomes an engine for systemic self-improvement.

Solutions to our Biggest Issues

Corporations tend to pursue profit, often disregarding the good of the communities and the planet. There is a promising movement in the corporate world toward social and environmental responsibility.  This trend could be greatly accelerated by increasing transparency and allowing consumers to “vote” with their dollars. If customers were directly telling a corporation when they were (and were not) purchasing from them, then both the corporation and the shareholders would see that, even from a pure profit motive, it is in their best interest to move toward the values of the consumer.

In the political realm, citizens suffer from a lack of transparency, getting their information from sources they don’t really trust, simply because trusted information is not readily available. The Trust Exchange would make highly rated news media (text, audio, video) readily accessible by filtering it through your trust network.

Who Benefits

Unlike today’s (mostly proprietary) rating systems, the public at large can benefit from the ratings exposed through the Trust Exchange. We do not propose to build another silo of proprietary information. We propose to build the network that links existing trust ratings together and inspires people to create new ratings and thereby sharing their valuable knowledge with their friends.

Anyone doing research on a purchase could tap into the publicly available ratings of relevant companies to help them choose a product or supplier aligned with their own values. Users with rich online social networks would benefit even more by inheriting ratings created by their trusted contacts. Corporations and governments will have much better information about the real desires and priorities of their customers and citizens.

Initial Steps

• Define a simple standard for exchanging ratings
• Define a “microformat” to expose ratings from any site
• Create a free, open source crawler to collate ratings
• Create a free, open source Trust Exchange web application, which can be used to gather trust ratings for a given organization. Any site could collect trust ratings from its users, either by dropping a Trust Exchange widget into their existing site code, or by installing the free Trust Exchange web application.
• Create a coalition of leading social networking and search companies, willing to implement the Trust Exchange protocol, and allow their users to share trust data across networks. This coalition could be spearheaded by Google, united by an inspiring mission, e.g. “Trust Exchange – Share Your Opinions, Save the World”
• Add Trust Exchange ratings from your community to product, news, and media search results

Optimal Outcome & Measuring Success

Level one of success: popular product search sites have integrated trust exchange ratings from the trust network of the current user.

Level two: influential organizations publish amalgamations of ratings from individuals and other organizations, which begin to have noticeable impact on the stock market.

Level three: the Trust Exchange begins to have an impact on elections – as your trust network automatically percolates its recommendations to you.

The Core Network is a social browser and visual interface based on the geometry and physics of space-time itself.  It traces our interactions and relationships with information displayed using colors and geometric shapes, while organizing them by shared keywords, categories, and proximity references. Through this organization of personal preferences and community interactions the system enables us to more clearly see how we are related to each other, as well as how closely we are connected.

The interface functions like a multidimensional map, with each user at the center of their own personal browser.  The user’s social and information networks, from people to bookmarked websites, surround them elegantly displayed in a color-coded geometric matrix.  Items they  interact with regularly position themselves adjacent to their “avatar” in the honeycomb grid,  while items they interact with less often are displayed further away.  Each connection in the grid is organically organized by relationship categories based on similar tags or keywords.  For ease of display and efficient user referencing these categories are simply represented by color-coded points.

The system is designed to aggregate data from a variety of social networks and search engines. It can be used as both a standalone browser or module that can be inserted into any existing website or application. Priorities in this interface design are flexibility and ease of use. The map is rendered and displayed with smooth physics-based movement and reorients itself according to your searches or general navigation.  The geometric structure can be rendered in 2D and 3D, as well as display changes in interactions over time.

Wikis have revolutionized textual information sharing. Documents created by harnessing collective collaboration far outperform previous modes of knowledge aggregation. Wikipedia has demonstrated the incredible effectiveness of this approach.

Just as open source has changed the face of software, and wikis have changed the arena of knowledge sharing, so too is a revolution brewing as creative collaboration becomes possible across all forms of media.  WikiNodes is designed to create a boundless and self-evolving container for collective intelligence to congregate around any type of project, while retaining the edits and contributions of every individual.

In the WikiNodes collaboration platform, contributors do not have to agree on a single version; each author can maintain their own latest version.  This “branching” of creative works encourages a diversity of perspectives that can be exchanged and interwoven in a massive creative network.  Authors can create unlimited branches, easily view differences between branches, and merge in changes from other versions and authors.  The power of remixing.

WikiNodes is an engine for large-scale parallel creative collaboration of all sorts. It harnesses the power of existing systems and workflows currently used for developing software, and applies them to creating media at large.

Toward that end, Enlightened Structure will provide a resource for open communication across the Internet. It will also lend way to information organization resting on natural principles of physics and consciousness. Jack brings to Enlightened Structure a tremendous spiritual vision and integrity, paired with a deep technical know-how.

He designed the interface that started the CORE Network as he worked to develop a way to model advanced structural models of energy in theoretical physics that would apply to both principles of Loop Quantum Gravity and Superstring Theory.

Adam is dedicated to Earth healing and Global environmental, social, and economic sustainability.

• LinkedIn Resume
• Jovan Thunder Design
• Sacred Knowledge Database

Harlan brings a decade of software development experience together with a diverse background including many years of work in various personal transformation systems. In addition to software, he is working on an open-IP licensed science fiction movie with spiritual punch.

• LinkedIn Resume
• Visions & Projects

Academic research builds upon other research. What if this could be done incrementally, as a living conversation? What if instead of having to wait for a whole “new” idea, a paper could be improved on incrementally, by anyone who had an improvement – minor or revolutionary? Then the world of research and noetic advancement could become truly alive, constantly morphing, reorganizing, improving the human knowledge ecosystem.

The technology involved is an extension of the “wiki” concept popularized by Wikipedia. But instead of trying to have a single, definitive version of each article, MPARCS allows each user to copy other users’ articles, for editing, combining, remixing.

Multi-Level Content Ratings

Ratings are an extremely important part of MPARCS. Suppose an article on a physics simulation algorithm spawns versions created by thousands of interested users. When the original author wants to review the most interesting revisions, considering whether to incorporate any of the new ideas into their own latest update, they can turn to peer ratings as a starting place, to locate the most interesting content.

A sophisticated ratings system will allow ratings at several levels: from the entry level, where any person can rate any article, up to the expert level, where articles deemed particularly “interesting” by the open ratings community can be assessed by credentialed experts in a given field. Users will also be able to rate other users, so that each user can create a personalized ratings matrix, where the ratings given to articles by users they trust will be weighted more significantly than those of users unknown to them.

New Models of IP Ownership

MPARCS will leverage the same populist power as Wikipedia, while also allowing for individual ownership – each user would be allowed to copy and then edit others’ (public domain) articles, but the original article would stay intact, allowing each contributor to receive full credit for the piece of the puzzle that they contribute. The system will allow users to see the complete history of any article, tracing its evolution through various authors, and providing a view of the differences between any two given versions.

Maximally Permissive Licensing

MPARCS will be released as free, open source software, utilizing maximally permissive licenses, allowing incorporation into free and commercial software without restriction. The intention is to create a standard platform, with no barriers to communication and incorporation into other systems.

Development Roadmap

The MPARCS engine is in progress, with an early beta version already available. The project could be greatly accelerated with relatively modest funding, in order to secure fulltime development efforts. This roadmap is designed in six-month phases, utilizing modern agile software development methodologies to deliver maximum value: the features of the highest priority to the end users. User testing at the end of every monthly iteration will feed back feature requests into the plan for the subsequent iteration.

Phase One

1. Text article creation and remixing (already implemented)
2. Display of article history
3. Ability to see the differences between any two versions of a given article
4. Login functionality, password retrieval, etc
5. Ability to rate articles and other users
6. Ability to tag articles – your own or others
7. Allow images as part of articles
8. Animated graphical browsing of article histories
9. Advanced markup such as mathematical symbols
10. Allow combining of articles to create new articles (multiple parentage)
11. Allow mirroring of existing articles from MediaWiki instances, including Wikipedia

Phases Two and Three

Functionality to be determined, based on requirements gathered in ongoing feedback and reviews.

Next Steps

MPARCS continues to be developed as a volunteer effort in individual developers’ spare time, supported by their belief in such a system enhancing the development of human knowledge. This progress could be greatly accelerated by a funding source with a similar interest in leveraging available technology to accelerate the human knowledge conversation.