





EDINBURGH, Scotland — “I believe we are at the start of a collaborative revolution that will be as significant as the industrial revolution.” With bold proclamations like that, What’s Mine Is Yours author Rachel Botsman described how she sees online reputation reinventing the way we think about wealth, power, and personal identity in the 21st century.

Citing a number of stories of what she calls micro-entrepreneurs — individuals that are making a living from services like Airbnb, Skillshare and Taskrabbit that match haves with wants — Botsman painted a picture of a future in which resumes and even credit scores are irrelevant, replaced by an aggregated digital reputation based on our interactions in the collaborative economy.

“I envision a real-time stream of who has trusted you when, where and why … that all lives together in one place,” she told the audience at TED Global. As opposed to services like Klout, which measure online influence, Botsman believes online reputation is ultimately universal; something that allows anyone in any location to instantly get an accurate picture of an individual’s trustworthiness.

Of course, that type of future depends on massive adoption of the services that act as the middlemen of the collaborative economy that Botsman envisions. She sees signs of that already happening, noting that nearly every street in Paris now has a room available on Airbnb, and that reputation scores on StackOverflow, a Q&A site for coders, are now becoming commonplace on resumes. Etsy, she notes, drove more than $500 million in sales for independent artists last year.

Part of Botsman’s enthusiasm for this movement is that in a sense, it uses technology — often criticized for making us less connected — to create more human interactions. “It’s empowering us [to make] connections that are enabling us to rediscover a humanness we’ve lost along the way,” she said.

What will make that type of interaction between strangers safe and secure, Botsman says, is “reputation capital” — a quantifiable metric that pulls together your reputation, intentions, capabilities and values across a wide variety of communities and marketplaces.

There are challenges to making the collaborative revolution a reality though. In addition to the need for much wider adoption and reliable reputation scores, there are significant privacy implications and a subset of the population will remain what she describes as “digital ghosts” — people that either don’t participate in collaborative economies or opt-out of reputation sharing.

That said, if Botsman’s vision is realized, the “digital ghosts” may find themselves at a significant disadvantage in a world that revolves around reputation.

Image credit: James Duncan Davidson, TED Conferences