I’ve spent the past week (21-24/10/2004) in Fribourg (Switzerland) working and discussing with Hassan Masum. I was guest of the Theoretical Physics Department of the University of Fribourg, precisely of the Interdisciplinary group leaded by Prof. Zhang. They apply methods and tools of Theoretical Physics (Statistical Mechanics, Probability Calculus ecc.) to other fields of research, namely economics, game theory, sociology or biology.
Hassan and Prof. Zhang are writing a book on Reputation Society. To get an idea of the topics you might want to have a look at their Manifesto for the Reputation Society.
We had 4 days of very interesting discussions. Perhaps they were not very focused (this is typical of me, I must admit) but we were free to jump from future economics systems to copyright and intellectual property issues, from emergent democracy to computation trust systems, from collaborative filtering to religion, from recommender systems to privacy, from … We were annotating issues in this wiki page and from it you can have an idea of the scope of our discussions.

Besides from research, I had excellent dinners (fundue [swiss melted cheese] and rosti’) and excellent chocolate. Moreover, in those days, there were 3 PhD defenses and following parties and this means I definitely ate too much.
I hope to meet Hassan and the other guys soon and in the meantime I suggest you to be prepared for the their forthcoming book: Reputation Society (yes, I suggested to Hassam to release it under a Creative Commons licence; Developing Nations CC might be an interesting option).