Reputation-Based Employment Marketplaces

Examples

From Melanie Swan at http://www.melanieswan.com/social_finance.html

"Top Coder is a website for programmers build reputations by competing to deliver the best coded solution to a given problem. The earned reputations confer status which presumably could be monetized depending on the objective of the coder. World-is-flat geographically disbursed virtual teams can be assembled ad-hoc based on reputation and skill affinities for the purpose of executing a project and then disbanded.

Rent A Coder is a reputation-based marketplace for software programming projects for development teams or individuals to bid for paid projects. Like the eBay model, a site reputation is crucial to securing projects. Presumably reputation-based online clearinghouses for project work will continue to expand." (http://www.melanieswan.com/social_finance.html)

Stack Overflow

Rachel Botsman:

'Stack Overflow reports more than 24 million unique visitors a month and around 5,500 questions are submitted to the site every day.

Voting on and editing questions are just two ways in which users can earn reputation points on Stack Overflow. "Reputation is earned by convincing your peers that you know what you are talking about," Spolsky says. "The reason why the site is 100 per cent spam-free and that around 80 per cent of all questions get answered is entirely a function of the community. The way we do that is as you earn more reputation points, you get more powers on the site."

Shortly after the site launched, Atwood and Spolsky heard that programmers were putting their Stack Overflow reputation scores on their CVs, and headhunters were searching the platform for developers with specific skills. "A CV tells you what schools they went to, what companies they worked for and how well they did on a standardised test when they were teenagers," Spolsky explains. "But if you read the writings of someone on Stack Overflow, you immediately know if they are a skilled programmer or not." In February 2011, Stack Overflow launched Careers 2.0, an invitation-only job board where companies can find skilled programmers.

Stack Overflow demonstrates how a person's reputation score created in one community is starting to have value beyond the environments where it was built. By answering questions in an expert forum, you create more opportunities to find a better job." (http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/09/features/welcome-to-the-new-reputation-economy?)