Henri Poole has been studying the dynamics of online communities for ~10 years now. In the early 90s, his first company, Vivid, prototyped a user interface for the Well. Later, as CEO of Linux distributor MandrakeSoft, he became intrigued by the idea of open source communities, and what made them tick. That interest led to his most recent venture Affero. Launched with 2 other MandrakeSoft refugees in the summer of 2001, Affero is trying to build a standard system of reputation measurement for the Internet.

i’m glad to see henri get some press for his cool venture. when i visited the company last fall, we had a couple very interesting discussions, and i helped them to debug their business plan. reputation management is crucial. so crucial that i would do some more free consulting for them if i still were in the bay area. i really want them to succeed. so henri, if you read this, hook me up with a plane ticket to san fran, and i’m game 🙂 we could probably build some infrastructure on top of their system to support OSCOM.

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