This BarCampAustinIII session was led by some people at Sabre talking about Cubeless, a corporate community platform. You can mark people or content as “shady” to report abuse, and they seem to have a pretty sophisticated reputation system based on a karma number. The karma points are calculated in a complicated way that fluctuates based on what is happening in the community, thus making it difficult to figure out how they work to game them. Also has most of the typical stuff: profiles, tag clouds, post-its (like wall on Facebooks), etc.

Cubeless powers the Sabre Town community. You can pull in your Sabre itinerary and share it with other people at your company and share only the details that your want to share. The platform is internal, corporate focused and travel focused, rather than being a general purpose collaboration platform; however, they are looking at making it work for external communities. They seem to want to keep in travel focused and have been resisting requests to make it more broad.

Cote started an interesting discussion about gaming reputation systems, and the difficulty of tying rewards into reputation systems like this karma point system.  Management likes to have metrics to measure knowledge worker performance, but this can create all sorts of issues. We’ve noticed this internally at Jive, too where certain job types tend to get more points in our internal Clearspace instance based on the amount / type of content. More points doesn’t necessarily mean better performance.

Overall, the product was kind of cool, but this session was a little too pitchy for me. All questions seemed to point back to their product.