A Portable Identity Across Events

I keep a mental list of people who show up. Not the speakers, they're easy to remember, but the ones who turn up at three or four Network Operator Group events in a row, answer the same beginner question for the fifth time without getting short about it, and quietly point someone to the right room when the schedule changes at the last minute. NOGnet, the event-support platform I've been building, sees a thin version of this: registration, session sign-ups, the odd post-event survey. Then it forgets everything the moment the event ends. The person who was invaluable at NOG X shows up at NOG Y as a blank row in a spreadsheet, same as everyone else.

I've been turning this over for a while, in the way you turn over an idea that doesn't have a shape yet. There's no schema for it, no feature branch, nothing I'd call a plan. Mostly the gap keeps bothering me whenever I watch an organizer try to figure out, from a room of two hundred strangers, who in that room has been reliable before, and who hasn't. Something like a portable object attached to a person, carried across events, that says a little about whether they've reliably shown up and contributed somewhere before. Not a profile. Not a resume. Something smaller and more specific than either.

The trouble starts as soon as I try to say what should count. Speaking at an event is an easy signal, since it's already public and timestamped. But most of what makes someone worth knowing at one of these events never gets written down anywhere. Running an informal side session that wasn't on the agenda. Sitting with someone at lunch who was clearly out of their depth and walking them through it, or flagging a scheduling conflict before it turned into a problem for forty people. None of that shows up in a database, even though it's the real texture of a NOG community.

Then there's the leaderboard problem, which I think about more than I'd like to admit. Network operator communities already have plenty of ego in them, plenty of people who've been doing this for twenty years and want you to know it. Give that a visible score and I'd bet the people who currently show up quietly to help would keep doing exactly that, quietly, while a different crowd started performing for the number instead. I do not want to build a status game. I'm just not sure yet how to build a useful version of this without it curdling into one, given enough users and enough time.

Privacy is the part I've resolved the least. Who decides what feeds into a thing like this, assuming it ends up existing at all. Does the person carrying it get final say over what shows, or is that missing the point, since a reputation you can freely edit isn't much of a reputation. And if it only works when people opt in, which feels like the only honest place to start, does it end up thin and self-selected, just another bio people write about themselves with a different label on it.

There's also a boundary question I keep going back and forth on. Someone's reliability inside one regional NOG, shaped by its own history and its own particular way of doing things, might mean nothing at a different event with a different crowd and different norms. Maybe the whole premise is backwards. Maybe this kind of trust is supposed to stay local and get rebuilt every time, and the friction of earning it again at each event is doing something useful rather than something worth designing away.

I don't have an answer to any of this yet, and I'm mostly writing it down so that saying it in public keeps me honest, instead of letting it quietly turn into a tidy pitch in my head somewhere down the line. If you've run one of these communities longer than I have, and you think this is solving a problem that doesn't exist, or that the boundary question above is the whole ballgame, I'd like to hear about it.