Community Equity at Sun Microsystems

Back in October (wow i can't believe it was that long ago-this is how i get wrinkles!) Peter Reiser, Mike Briggs and Neeraj Mathur at Sun Microsystems took Robert Scoble , Greg Merkle and myself through an overview of what they were building for their customer engineering group around Community Equity.

This week Peter posted additional details on his blog because they have finally filled patent on the work they had been doing- Congrats to the team!

You can also read Peters original public thoughts and passion for Community Equity as a way to measure Social Capital for an enterprise.

The post provides an overview of all Equity values- Information and Personal (Participation, Contribution, Skills, Reputation etc.) that are captured for the participating communities. I find the Information Equity (IQ) piece quite interesting because it is about the object itself and what was done to it:


The Information Equity captures the social activities around an information and dynamically calculated a numeric value which represents the importance, relevance and quality of an information. An information can be a wiki page, blog post, document etc.
* How many times users have viewed an information
* How many times this information had been downloaded by the users (in case of attachment)
* How many times this information were re-used by an individual
* Users feedbacks (ratings, comments)

In a shared collaborate Enterprise environment the notion that the document is 'scored' proactively by set standards in multiple ways and that information is stored within the document is quite important- because when a person leaves essentially their personal equity is no longer valuable (ok it might take a while to degrade but you understand my point). Other items that they are addressing that are quite important in the Enterprise space include:
- document reuse around information equity
- equity aging

He promises to keep us updated on the work they are doing so if you are interested make sure to subscribe to the specific subject /Community Equity.

Update: Robert Scoble interviews Peter Reiser on the road.