F. Randall “Randy” Farmer has been creating online community systems for over 30 years, and has co-invented many of the basic structures for both virtual worlds and social software. His firsts include: one of the first multiplayer online games; one of the first message boards; the first virtual world; the first avatars; the first online marketplace; the first user newsfeed/friend feed (in Yahoo! 360°); the first multi-purpose reputation platform and grammar; and many other smaller firsts—several of which are documented in the form of various patents which are either granted or in process. He has co-authored numerous papers on the topics of virtual worlds and social media which have been published in books and across the Internet. His most widely read publication is entitled The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat, which he co-authored with Chip Morningstar. Lessons is cited in over 50 publications (according to Google publication search.)

For almost 5 years Randy worked as the community strategic analyst for Yahoo!, the world's largest Internet portal, advising Yahoo properties on best practices for construction of their online communities. Randy was the principal designer of Yahoo's global reputation platform and the reputation models that were deployed upon it:

• Yahoo! Mail antispam
• Yahoo! Answers troll and quality control
• Yahoo Message Boards message quality end-user karma
• And others…

Randy was also a co-author of the Yahoo Open Strategy initiative. After the completion of this book on reputation, he hopes to publish another book on the Yahoo! Open Strategy and one on his experiences from three decades of online community building, tentatively entitled: Context is King.

Randy is in high demand as a freelance community systems design consultant and public speaker, and his online publications and interviews are widely read and cited.

• Published field work, with Chip Morningstar: The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat
• Visionary prognostication (presentation and paper), with Morningstar and Crockford: From Habitat to Global Cyberspace - A pre-web vision of the internet.
• Persuasive argument paper - systems theory and design, solo authorship: KidTrade: A Design for an eBay-resistant Virtual Economy
• Blog Co-author Habitat Chronicles, a journal of social media and virtual world design and operations issues.

Bryce Glass is a Sr. Interaction Designer at Yahoo! Inc, and has worked on Internet community products and platforms for most of the past 10 years, with some of the Internet's best-known brands (Netscape, America Online and Yahoo!) Bryce was the User Experience lead for Yahoo's Reputation Platform and consulted with designers and product managers on a number of properties (Yahoo! Buzz, Yahoo! Answers and Message Boards, amongst others) that employed it. Bryce distilled the research and best practices from those engagements into a series of User Experience Patterns for Reputation that have garnered much attention in the social software design world.

Bryce is also recognized for his work on visualizing complex ideas in a straightforward and approachable fashion. His diagram, Flickr User Model, has been featured in numerous information visualization blogs and was included in Dan Brown's Communicating Design. He looks forward to the challenge of illustrating a deep and detailed model for Reputation Systems in this book.

• Designing Your Reputation System: A presentation given at 2008 IA Summit, touches on many of the ideas that will be expanded upon in BW2RS. (Note that the Slideshare presentation has been viewed 12470 times, and favorited more than 70 times.)
• Concept model visualization: Yahoo! Vitality ecosystem
• Short-form writing: Design Patterns for Displaying Reputation
• Written (email) interview on reputation patterns: Part 1 and Part 2
• Flickr User Model: Illustrating user concepts for Flickr to a non-technical audience.