1.9 SRS: Social Recognition Software

What it provides, & why it's important

Why Recognition is important

To be seen and appreciated by others isn’t merely a nice feeling, it’s at the core of what allows us to function as individuals, communities, and societies. Our capacity for empathy and compassion, for cooperation, collaboration, even survival, are all dependent on our ability to recognize the inherent value in one another.

Recognition is the way in which we discover our mutual interests, complementary needs, and shared humanity, which make us willing and able to ally with one another and make things happen. And being recognized does feel good, whether for our own achievements, or as part of a group. We like the feeling, and even without understanding its broader implications -the need for recognition still drives us.

Recognition at scale

But beyond Dunbar's number (give or take a few hundred), receiving meaningful recognition becomes a challenge. The greater social sphere of society often seems too large, too impersonal, & too transient for our individual actions to take root, establish a pattern, and bear the fruits of recognition. To make those patterns of interaction visible we don't need to increase viscosity across social spheres, but increase the communication between them. -A means (and metrics) to attest to the character of a person that is both agent-centric and persistent, regardless of which circle they travel in. We call this Reputation.

Reputations form the groundwork and incentive for good faith interactions, and are at the heart of what enables EVR to function as it does. We realize that our users are not a homogeneous group, but rather a cognitively diverse collection of individuals, each with their own sensibilities, sensitivities, and needs. Rather than building a Reputation accounting system around an ideal “average user”, we’ve designed our system to accommodate and adjust for the nuances of each individual use case. The process of translating experiential reviews into Reputations occurs by means of our Social Recognition Software; and incorporates a set of constraints and adjustments to normalize and maintain equitability across the diverse range of our user base.