Hacking Happiness by John Havens Read Free Book Online Page B

of traditional credit transformed our consumer system and in many ways controlled who had access to what. In the twenty-first century, new trust networks and the reputation capital they generate will reinvent the way we think about wealth, markets, power, and personal identity in ways we can’t yet even imagine. 1
RACHEL BOTSMAN
    M Y MOM RECENTLY decided to move, now that it’s been two years since my dad died. After decades of meticulous financial record-keeping and making payments on time, she learned she had to restart her credit score from scratch as a widow. Reminiscent of the gaping flaw in the GDP of not measuring women as primary caregivers, this practice also highlights the need to overhaul an outdated system.
    Credit reporting’s history began more than a century ago, beginning with small retailers banding together to trade financial information about their customers. The early credit associations often focused on collecting negative financial information about people as well as data about sexual orientations and other private behavior. Oftentimes it was this private information that would justify associations’ denying services, reflecting negatively on people’s reputations.
    Not exactly a hallowed past regarding our financial forefathers.
    Just as harrowing as this fiscal bigotry from credit associations was their lack of transparency. As Malgorzata Wozniacka and Snigdha Sen noted in their article “Credit Scores: What You Should Know About Your Own,” it wasn’t until 2001 that people could gain direct access to their credit scores. 2 This created a precedent for opaque collection practices around consumer information that data brokers have emulated in the online world. We have time in our Connected World, however, to wrest data back from brokers and control our identities and fates.
    I wrote a piece for Mashable in 2011 called “Why Social Accountability Will Be the New Currency of the Web.” 3 I was fascinated with online networks that had measurements reflecting trust generated by action where ratings were based on what people had done versus just how they were perceived as people.
    One of the first places I looked was in the business world. Measuring performance is not a new idea, but typically it’s only managers who rate employees based largely on their productivity. New models have emerged, however, that aggregate peer-to-peer comparisons to form a picture of someone’s overall accountability, or reputation. One of these is Work.com, formerly known as Rypple and now a part of Salesforce.com. For my piece, I interviewed Nick Stein, who, at the time, was director of content and media for Rypple and is now senior director, marketing and communications, at Salesforce.com. A “social performance” platform, Work.com aggregates positive feedback (in the form of recognition) provided by colleagues. This recognition appears on an individual’s social profile, providing a snapshot of that person’s capabilities—as determined by their peers—thereby contributing to their reputation at work.
    I asked Stein if he saw a day when someone’s Work.com score could become portable, meaning it would follow an employee from one job to the next. While he felt the number of variables dependent on the context of one organization might not translate to a second one, he did feel measures like Work.com would have an influence on reputation.
As we move toward a more social and transparent workplace environment, influence is becoming less dependent on your place in the org chart and more on the real, measurable impact you have on your colleagues. The idea is that all ongoing feedback, both positive and constructive, helps build an employee’s real reputation at work . . . This enables individuals to develop influence based on their real impact rather than a perception of where they sit in the company hierarchy. 4
    I want to focus on Stein’s idea of “real impact” now that the Connected World includes