the galapag.us tribe

The Galapag.user tribe believes that radical transparency offers more solutions for protecting ourselves in the future than trying to become even more reclusive and secretive with our digital footprints.

We can use our data, the data that we own, to prove our social reputations or to disprove our own misconceptions about our own behaviors and habits.

Instead of preventing our data from leaking to companies and governments, we can interconnect our webs of data with those whom we trust, so that we're less susceptible to defamation, blackmail, and other methods used by those who hoard information.

Galapag.us believes in these things:

Our tribal values:

We believe that a primary goal of life is to maximize eudaimonia and to help others do the same.

We individuals own our own data, and can control its availability.

We believe in sharing and strength through interconnectedness.

We believe in transparency and accountability.

Our data is a powerful form of expression of our own identities, and we should be allowed to fully show and present that data identity and reputation in a free society.

We are each members of many tribes and have many identities and faces, and only through all layers combined can we be understood in context.

We believe in networked webs of people reinforcing validity of each others' information.

We believe in generativity through open source and open, linked, organized data.

We believe in economic incentives and positive externalities.

We believe in being fast and adaptive.

We individuals can balance the benefits of others, governments, and companies having data about us, against the benefits of retaining ownership, oversight, and privacy of our own data.

We individuals benefit from being more public and open, rather than less.

We individuals should be able to fully express ourselves by being honest, open, vulnerable, genuine, and caring.

We individuals, through sharing our own data, can benefit from what currently only governments and companies can exploit off of us.

Instead of rumors, gossip, credit ratings, etc. determining reputation, we can use data science, Moneyball, and a combination of quantification and qualification to build a more thorough reputation for ourselves that doesn't just rely on wealth and popularity.

Our ultimate goals:

We will become the standard for the world's 21st century reputation system.

We will give every human on Earth (and his internet of things) a reputation and identity.

We will marry quantification and qualification.

We will make social data and social capital household phrases.

We will be the example of open social information.

We will provide the model for transparency.

We will explore mechanisms for direct democracy.

We will organize everyone's personal data.

Fork/pull request/comment on this at the galapagus/tribe Github repo.

click here to begin exploring
now open for alpha testing!

the ecosystem

Galapag.us stores any of your personal data (rites of passage, interactions, moments, thanks, deeds, etc.) so that you can compare your statistics against your history and against other people. Imagine if you could observe and analyze your life more objectively and statistically, the way governments can analyze their gross domestic product or employment numbers.

screenshots:

screenshot of the evolution editor screen

Galapag.us will catalog every person in the world, allowing anyone to contribute information about a person, alive or dead, in hopes of remembering multiple facets and perceptions of a person, for mankind's posterity. We intend to remember past heroes, reward good behavior, bring awareness of those who have been "disappeared" by others. We intend to give context to the faceless names we gloss over daily. We intend to figure out the hidden Moneyball talents in your office, community, tribe.

One key metric, as a result of this information, will be the value of the difference in what someone says about himself and what others say about him. What are the traits of people who are misperceived, versus people who are seen as "genuine"?

Much of the data (hover here for a list) will be compared to time, since the one restraint all humans and objects share, since education and income and class and other factors can differ but not be total determinants of outcome, is time. We are all constrained to what we can do within the 24 hours in a day.

Try our welcome demo.
thanking, deeds, perceptions, liminality
Try AdjectApproval.
guess who someone is based on simple adjectives!

We're in alpha testing, so things are still buggy and the maps of the islands are not very mature yet. But for now:

the founder

I'm Ben Turner. I worked on Galapag.us, conceived in 2006, for my orals/thesis work at Georgetown's Masters of Science in Foreign Service program and NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program.

I'm an application engineer at Vimeo and am a former US Army paratrooper sergeant providing military intelligence Arabic crypto-linguist support to a Special Forces unit.

I also researched as a junior Yahoo!/Institute for the Study of Diplomacy fellow at Georgetown University, studying openness and closedness in the BRIC countries, and worked as a social media operations analyst and team lead while in DC.