Interested in following this, but words cannot describe how much I despise the mailing list format, especially for anything vaguely important.
The only real purpose of the mailing list is to figure out how to manage the project. (e.g. what's the best way to communicate, what tools to use?)
Pasting from the (only) message I've sent to the list so far:
One of the first things we need to do is set up a project tracking
website to keep everything efficient. I just purchased hosting for
4btc/mo from soulacehosting.net and have set up the site
http://bitcoin.subvert.me. What should go there? Git repos? Trac?
The initial goal of this project as is to come up with a standard,
or set of standards, governing webs of trust. The WOT model
is really useful in a lot of different contexts, and one of the neat
things about them is they're exportable. #bitcoin-otc's databases are
public, here:
http://bitcoin-otc.com/otc/ They use GPG keys as
identities, with a meta layer on top of that (viz. rating and a
comment). This data could easily be exported as plaintext and imported
to any site that wanted to initialize or update their trust database.
Some initial thoughts:
-If many sites all publicize their ratings, they can create a truly
global web of trust and everyone benefits. if everyone keeps their
data private (or simply inaccessible), everyone loses
-Sites may have different internal implementations, but should use a
JSON or similar API to share trust data
-Design to allow crypto schemes other than GPG
-Draft some ways to audit public trust DB's. This way we can detect
site owners tampering with ratings (maybe the site operator signs each
rating)
-How to deal with merge conflicts? Alice may have a high rating on
site A and a low rating on site B when site C imports trust ratings
from both A and B
