Identity Commons/Gang Dinner Dec 7th
We are confirmed at Sauce for 7pm. We have a large table in their back room. Please come if you are in the Bay Area either for RSA or not.
RSVP on the wiki ASAP.
Archives for January 2007
It is official…Identity Society Meeting London Feb 19.
This is going to be a great follow on to BarCamp London happening on the weekend. (you have to scroll down to see the wiki content)
Monday, February 19th, 2007
Venue: BT Tower Restaurant, 34th Floor, 60 Cleveland Street, London W1
You are cordially invited to the Inaugural Identity Society Open Space event.
This event is for anyone who is interested in identity and its relevance to society. If you wish to attend please proceed to the Registration page. Please also feel free to spread the word to others! The wiki for the event can be found at IdentitySociety.org
- 8:30 am registration with 9.00 start (with two breaks and a one-hour lunch)
- Welcome and Open Space orientation
- Key speakers describe the genesis of the Identity Society and identity Open Space collaboration experience to date
- A discussion of topics for the break out sessions (which has already started in the identity society mailing list)
- Concluding sessions will include one on “Organising the Identity Society”
- The end of the open space is for announcements—and a sharing of the Open Space experience.
- Closing at the BT Tower Venue 4.00pm
- Everyone is invited for evening drinks (and possibly some food)
Initial discussion proposes that the “Identity Society” is not necessarily primarily a talking shop for the ins and outs of “identity technologies”, but might take a broader remit—of identity’s relevance to society as a whole—how we express our unique identity as individuals and collectives freely, but how we also want the benefits of cooperation and collaboration. This is of course in a context within which technology would have a vital place..
However, what Identity Society becomes is very much still up for grabs, and is down to all of us to decide. Which is hopefully what the Feb 19th meeting will help us begin to do.
We look forward to your contribution, in person or through the wiki.
Identity Event Dates
Last week we had three great events. Liberty 2.0, VRM and Mobile Identity.
The Spring program of Identity events has settled out.
February 7th will be a Identity Commons/Gang Dinner during the Week of RSA and the Open Mobile Alliance.
February 19th the folks in the UK are having and Identity Society gathering in London. It will be done with Open Space.
April 16-17 we will be doing and Identity Open Space in collaboration with Liberty Alliance before their meeting in Brussels.
May 14-16 will be Internet Identity Workshop in Mountainview will be the main meeting place for Identity Commons working groups.
Free Speach Threat was really about catching AstroTurf
It seems that catching astroturf was more the aim of section 220 of the bill that I blogged about a few days ago as threatening free speach. It turns out the blogosphere uproar was really lead by a conservative Astroturf.
Conservative direct-mail guru Richard Viguerie whipped the blogging community into a frenzied, and largely misdirected, opposition to the provision by trumpeting the section’s supposed threat to First Amendment rights, freedom, Mom and apple pie.
Section 220 was designed to shed light on so-called “Astroturf” campaigns – seemingly grassroots campaigns that are in fact funded and guided by lobbying or PR firms, usually on behalf of large corporate clients. It would have required lobbying firms or individuals who were retained for “paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying” to register with the US Congress, similar to the registration requirement currently in place for K Street lobbyists.
Because of clumsy wording that would have included an employer in the definition of a “client,” the requirement would have applied to anyone who, in the service of their employer, engaged in the stimulation of grassroots lobbying designed to influence more than 500 people, as long as the organization spent over $25,000 per quarter on the activity. Thus, anyone who was paid $25,000 per quarter to maintain a weblog with a readership of more than 500 people would have to register with Congress under section 220 if they spent all of their time encouraging the general public to contact an executive or legislative official over a matter of public policy’.
Thus, instead of putting pressure on the Senate to fix a well-intentioned – but poorly executed – proposal, ATA launched a scare campaign aimed at convincing the blogging community that the federal government was waiting in the wings to send its critics in the blogosphere to jail if they failed to register as grassroots lobbyists.
Identity MAGNET
I am heading over to the ITU-T Focus Group on Identity Management next month.
Lee Dryburgh is going to be there. I am looking forward to meeting him finally. We have been corresponding in IM for a while now. His talk follows mine at eTel.
He pointed to the MAGNET Project recently. I went there to check out what they are up to…
MAGNET – My personal Adaptive Global Network
MAGNET Beyond is a worldwide R&D project within Mobile and Wireless Systems and Platforms Beyond 3G. MAGNET Beyond will introduce new technologies, systems, and applications that are at the same time user-centric and secure. MAGNET Beyond will develop user-centric business model concepts for secure Personal Networks in multi-network, multi-device, and multi-user environments
MAGNET Beyond has 30 partners from 15 countries, among these Industrial Partners, Universities, and Research Centres.
Then I went deeper and found IST Projects listed with a cornucopia of creative acronyms and inspiring words. However what is less clear is what has happened to any of them in terms of actual technology and deployment that works for people.
Ambient Network
In the telecommunications world of future, there will be many different networks. To provide users with the services they want irrespective of their location, these networks have to cooperate. In a highly mobile environment, this network cooperation will have to be established ‘on the fly’. The Ambient Networks project is about making this fast network cooperation a reality.
Cruise NoE IST Project (CReating Ubiquitous Intelligent Sensing Environments)
The Network of Excellence (NoE) CRUISE intends to be a focal point in the planning and coordination of research on communication and application aspects of wireless sensor networking in Europe.
DAIDALOS – Designing Advanced network Interfaces for the Delivery and
Administration of Location independent, Optimised personal Services.
(((Doesn’t this sound like VRM)))
DAIDALOS is an EU Framework Programme 6 Integrated Project, currently in its second phase. Mobility has become a central aspect of the lives of European citizens in business, education, and leisure. The rapid technological and societal changes and the bewildering emergence of numerous new services has created a complex environment for network operators and a confusing situation for end users. The enhancement of existing technologies and development of new Beyond 3G systems will increase this complexity even more.
The End-to-End Reconfigurability (E2R) project aims at realising the full benefits of the diversity within the radio eco-space, composed of wide range of systems such as cellular, fixed, wireless local area and broadcast. The key objective of the E2R project is to devise, develop, trial and showcase architectural design of reconfigurable devices and supporting system functions to offer an extensive set of operational choices to the users, application and service providers, operators, and regulators in the context of heterogeneous systems. Innovative research, development and proof of concept are to be pursued from an end-to-end perspective, stretching from user device through all system levels.
e-SENSE VISION – e-SENSE enables capturing of Ambient Intelligence for Beyond 3G Mobile Communication Systems through Wireless Sensor Networks.
Ambient Intelligence is a key component for future beyond 3G mobile and wireless communication systems. However, the enabling technology that provides systems with information to allow for Ambient Intelligence has been neglected and currently consists of many independent modes of input, mainly relying on active user interactions or specialised sensor systems gathering information.
is a three year (2002-2005) European research project (IST-2001-34734), on self-organizing and collaborative energy-efficient sensor networks. It address the convergence of distributed information processing, wireless communications, and mobile computing.
The vision of ubiquitous computing requires the development of devices and technologies, which can be pervasive without being intrusive. The basic components of such a smart environment will be small nodes with sensing and wireless communications capabilities, able to organize flexibly into a network for data collection and delivery.
HIDENETS (HIghly DEpendable ip-based NETworks and Services) is a specific targeted research project funded by the European Union under the Information Society Sixth Framework Programme. The project was started in January 2006 and have a duration of 3 years.
The aim of HIDENETS is to develop and analyze end-to-end resilience solutions for distributed applications and mobility-aware services in ubiquitous communication scenarios. Technical solutions will be developed for applications with critical dependability requirements in the context of selected use-cases of ad-hoc car-to-car communication with infrastructure service support.
MIMOSA – “Microsystems platform for MObile Services and Applications”
Make Ambient Intelligence a reality by developing a mobile-phone centric open
technology platform
RUNES – Reconfigurable Ubiquitous Networked Embedded Systems
Embedded systems are now ubiquitous. They can be found in a diverse range of appliances, from mobile phones to smoke alarms, from refrigerators to trucks. Enabling these systems to communicate opens up new areas of applications: smart buildings, industrial automation, healthcare, power distribution and host of others. Some of the applications will result in a more efficient, accurate or cost effective solution than previous ones. Others will be new, previously unimagined or impossible. We are in the middle of a major technological revolution that will affect many aspects of our lives, and Europe is well placed to be at the forefront of exploiting this technology.
Moving to this exciting new technique in system development necessitates a common language for all systems. Without this, we risk repeatedly ‘re-inventing the wheel’ at a high cost in money and effort, and we compromise the inter-operability of sensors between applications.
Simplicity – Secure, Internet-able, Mobile Platforms LeadIng CItizens Toward simplicitY.
The development of new ICT devices and network-based services has generated a bewildering array of configuration procedures, access technologies and protocols. For non-technical users, excessive complexity is an obstacle to take-up of these new technologies.
The Simplicity project has developed and evaluated tools, techniques and architectures to remove this complexity, enabling users to customize devices and services with minimal effort.
WINNER – Wireless World Initiative New Radio
is a consortium of 41 partners co-ordinated by Siemens working towards enhancing the performance of mobile communication systems. The improvements of radio transmission to be explored by WINNER are crucial for enabling new mobile services and applications anytime and anywhere.
Our challenge is to make mobile communication systems more adaptable to user needs.
There were these other links out to other projects:
Wireless World Research Forum
WWI – World Wireless Initiative
MOCCA – Mobile Cooperation and Coordination Action
Information Society Technologies
ECMA “Standards at Internet Speed”
ESTI – “Home of ICT Standardization”
Credit Checks by the Government 'legal'
More privacy invasion by the Executive Branch:
Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday the Pentagon and CIA are not violating people’s rights by examining the banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage in the United States.
Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, the new chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said his panel will be the judge of that.
National security letters permit the executive branch to seek records about people in terrorism and spy investigations without a judge’s approval or grand jury subpoena.
Security on the web a topic at Davos
This was from Ashok Vemuri – SVP and Head of the Banking and Capital Markets Business, Infosys Technologies on the Forum Blog.
Often, the informal conversations you have over coffee are far more valuable than the public forums and one of the more interesting themes that came up amongst those I spoke to today was security. I’ve attended several meetings since my arrival and been involved in a number of discussions with banking institutions and business executives about the threats they’re currently facing.
Phishing, phreaking and pharming are now everyday terms and the kind of attacks that are having a massive impact on customer confidence driving the demand for some kind of security governing body. There is a definite feeling amongst delegates that trust is slowly dissolving amongst customers who are getting increasingly disillusioned about the safety of their information with their bank.
I had several fascinating statistics thrown at me in conversation. Whilst three years ago 90 percent of hacker attacks were benign with little dollar impact, 90 percent of hacking nowadays is malicious designed to disrupt data or steal information. One of the newest concepts I heard about earlier was ‘data-kidnapping’ – where hackers break into business systems and block a company from using its data, effectively holding them to ransom.
This provoked fierce debate about accountability amongst many of my fellow delegates. If an online banking customer has his account details stolen and loses money, who is responsible? Is it the user for not keeping his identity secure or is it the bank whose security may have been compromised? Doubtless, this is set to be the biggest driver behind the calls for regulation and standards with banks crying out for guidance from a governing body.
It makes sense. If we have regulators for the Internet, telecommunications and accounting then surely we should have some standards in place for security? Someone to turn to so there is no doubt over where the responsibilities lie or what actions should be taken when a security breach happens.
This post proves 1) Open Space is a great way to do events. Even at this incredible event the coffee breaks rock. 2) The issues that the Identity community is seeking to address are front and center amongst world business and political elites.
I also think there is a problem with he thinking that we need to have a security ‘governing’ body. I hope that those thinking along these lines can get with the ‘internet’ paradigm and read the Accountable Net: Peer Production of Internet Governance White Paper (Crawford, Johnson, Palfry) and Article (by Esther Dyson)
The Abstract:
Three problems of online life – spam, informational privacy, and network security – lend themselves to the peer production of governance. Traditional sovereigns have tried and, to date, failed to address these three problems through the ordinary means of governance. The sovereign has a role to play in the solution to each of the three, but not as a monopoly and not necessarily in the first instance. A new form of order online, brought on by private action, is emerging in response to these problems. If properly understood and encouraged, this emerging order could lead to an accountable internet without an offsetting loss of those aspects of online life that we have found most attractive.
There has been a great deal of loose talk about the need for internet governance, particularly in the context most recently of the World Summit on the Information Society, but much less careful analysis of the question whether the online world really does pose special problems, or present special opportunities, for collective action. There has been a general discussion as to whether the internet, as a general rule, lends itself to governance by traditional sovereigns or if something in the net’s architecture resists such forms of control. We do not seek to re-open this debate, acknowledging at the outset the important role that traditional sovereigns have to play in most areas of decision-making and enforcement on the internet. Rather, we seek to look more closely at a series of particularly thorny issues that have proven especially challenging for policy makers seeking to impose governance by states. We seek the special problems — and corresponding opportunities – of online activity and assess the relative merits of various options for how to resolve them.
World Economic Forum and World Social Forum
I have friends who blog at both events this week. It should be interesting to watch them both unfold.
Halley Suite of (Halley’s Comment) is at the World Economic Forum and Karri Winn who I work with at Planetwork and writter on World Changing SF is at the World Social Forum.
I just checked out the Davos ‘forum Blog’ and it turns out Jim Fruchterman of Benetech is also going to be Blogging. I also have met Gillian from Witness at SVN related events.
"sousveillance" coming to NYC
Jamais Cascio picked up this tidbit from the State of the City address in NYC.
This year, we’ll begin a revolutionary innovation in crime-fighting: Equipping “911” call centers to receive digital images and videos New Yorkers send from cell phones and computers something no other city in the world is doing.
If you see a crime in progress or a dangerous building condition you’ll be able to transmit images to 911, or online to NYC.GOV. And we’ll start extending the same technology to 311 to allow New Yorkers to step forward and document non-emergency quality of life concerns holding City agencies accountable for correcting them quickly and efficiently.
Jamais has talked about the Participatory Panopticon we are creating with emerging digital tools. (I have talked about his before on my blog – tracking the torture taxi, Condi sousveillance)
This 911/311 use is “also an example of how a participatory panopticon society can be embraced by traditional channels of authority and social control.”
Google Data Privacy Called for:
Jamais blogs about this post from Fred House via Hawk Wings
I think I need a new Google product to drop into beta. That would be, let’s see, Google Data Privacy. GDP would allow me to review all of the information that Google retains on me across all services, from all devices, and from all sources. GDP would allow me to determine the maximum data retention period for each of my services. GDP would allow me to selectively opt out of cross-service data mining & correlation, even if it reduced the quality of the services I receive. GDP would allow me to correct any inaccurate data in my profile. And GDP would log and alert me when my data was queried by other services.
I want my Google Data Privacy.
Hey Marc where were you?
Marc Canter didn’t make it to the Liberty 2.0 event. His appearance in the audience would have made the whole day a lot more interesting. Talking in the back channel with some folks we observed that the audience there didn’t seem to be that many web 2.0 folks (but since folks didn’t introduce themselves it is hard to be sure). We did find one who came for dinner he has a company called ‘somewhere.com.’ I still think there is a gap between how ‘liberty talks’ and how ‘web 2.0 developers listen’.
Getting there was a bit of a pain. The upscale veryEURO Sofitel was super snobby when it came to getting a lift from the Airport via their airport shuttle. They would only transport registered “guests” people going to meetings there don’t count. So I was out $30 for the cab ride there. 15 of us choose to go out for dinner away from the hotel…mmm..so that was $600-700 we didn’t spend on them.
Because meetings should also mean meeting the criteria to guarantee success, Sofitel has fashioned a new business meeting experience in prestige hotel venues based on the exceptional and the exemplary: luxuriously fitted spaces, first-class cuisine tailored to your specifications, and dedicated staff. BUT NO RIDES FROM THE AIRPORT…
I have to get back there tomorrow for the VRM working meeting. Not sure how I will do that exactly. The next day it is the Mobile and Identity unconference that Doc is going to facilitate.
Looking ahead to Burning Man 2007
One of the personal highlights of last year was going to Burning Man with the Sustainabilaville Camp. The experience continues reverberate and deepen as I move about the world. I just got back from a big east coast trip and I went places that I never normally go because I don’t drive. The car based lifestyle that I witnessed going by on the highway and train tracks was kind of shocking to me. It brought into focus the strong contrast of Burning Man and the contrast of being in the desert and walking and biking around the playa.
I have been looking forward to going back to Burning Man this year since returning. On top of everything Burning Man was a very interesting ‘identity experience.’ I am going to be leading a camp based on model that my Seattle Sustainabilaville friends have perfected over several years. One of the reasons I am leading a camp is because I want to be supportive of members of the identity community being able to go. There is already one identity gang member signed up to go 🙂
I am currently working on getting together 10-15 people to be the founding organizational group. I hope to have it formed by the end of February.
The theme is the Green Man – one of my favorite archetypes – the masculine in relationship to nature a sort of a pair to the ‘mother earth’ archetype. So the Green Man is ‘manly’ and powerful yet has a deep connected relationship to the natural world. He “rises” in the spring and goes to rest in the winter.
Freedom of Speech Seriously Threatened.
Some highlights from this Blog speak for itself. (I didn’t have time to do all the linking from the quotes so click through to get them.
The U.S. Government wants to force bloggers and online grassroots activists to register and regularly report their activities to Congress in the latest astounding attack on the internet and the First Amendment.
Richard A. Viguerie, Chairman of GrassrootsFreedom.com, a website dedicated to fighting efforts to silence grassroots movements, states:
Section 220 of S. 1, the lobbying reform bill currently before the Senate, would require grassroots causes, even bloggers, who communicate to 500 or more members of the public on policy matters, to register and report quarterly to Congress the same as the big K Street lobbyists. Section 220 would amend existing lobbying reporting law by creating the most expansive intrusion on First Amendment rights ever. For the first time in history, critics of Congress will need to register and report with Congress itself.
During an appearance with his wife Barbara on Fox News last November, George Bush senior slammed Internet bloggers for creating an “adversarial and ugly climate.”
– The White House’s own recently de-classified strategy for “winning the war on terror” targets Internet conspiracy theories as a recruiting ground for terrorists and threatens to “diminish” their influence.
– The Pentagon recently announced its effort to infiltrate the Internet and propagandize for the war on terror.
– In a speech last month, Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff identified the web as a “terror training camp,” through which “disaffected people living in the United States” are developing “radical ideologies and potentially violent skills.” Chertoff pledged to dispatch Homeland Security agents to local police departments in order to aid in the apprehension of domestic terrorists who use the Internet as a political tool.
Make no mistake, the internet, one of the greatest outposts of free speech ever created is under constant attack by powerful people who cannot operate within a society where information flows freely and unhindered. All these moves mimic stories we hear every week out of State Controlled Communist China, where the internet is strictly regulated and virtually exists as its own entity away from the rest of the web.
Liberty Alliance opens Liberty 2.0 Day
This is the first time that I have seen Roger Sullivan since he became President of the Liberty Alliance. He introduced Liberty Alliance and shared their new definition of themselves.
Liberty Alliance is the only global body working on define and drive open technology standards, privacy and business guidelines for digital identity management.
He was very explicitly in recognizing that there were lots of people in the industry working on solving identity management problems.
He talked about what he saw Liberty doing and looking to do in the next year:
- Exhibiting “Market Leadership” through demonstrating value in a particular space
- Increasing Transparency – be recognixed for defining open standards.
- Achieve good visability for members and non-members to activities early and often
- Inclusiveness work effectively with other industry bodies and individuals to define and develop the market – other organizations unique and different
- Reduce barriers to participation.
He spoke again about the need to work with other organizations working on identity and to work together so that the customers are not confused by articulating the commonalities and differences. I completely agree with this however I must point out the obvious – by naming openLiberty -openLiberty market confusion will result because of the similarity with the OpenID name. As someone who spends an enormous amount of her time communicating with to the people and companies in “the market” this just added yet another thing that I must explain to people. Sigh.
He closed by highlighting members of the board of Liberty and their companies. AOL, France Telecom, Ericsson, Fidelity, HP, NTT, Intel, Oracle, Sun, Novell.
They have a new website design that seems easier to navigate. I found this history timeline, backgrounder PDF, and a public community section.
openLiberty Announcement
THE “ANNOUNCEMENT” at the Liberty 2.0 meeting was for openLiberty.
It is a global Liberty Alliance Open Source Initiative to support open source developers building identity-based applications, addressing key industry requirements for increased security and privacy. It will support easier and faster application development and Interoperability with Liberty-based deployments worldwide.
“ID-WSF is currently the only realistic framework for securing Web services…”
– Scott Cantor, Internet2
It will be a comprehensive portal – referencing and complementing other open source infinitives such as Bandit, Higgins, OpenID etc. It includes Forums, Wiki, discussions and a member-contributed downloadable code based on Liberty Federation and Liberty Web Services.
The Initial focus will be on ID-WSF WEb Services Consumer WSC libraries and SAMLE 2.0 functionality. Participate, leverage, contribute, Converge!
One question was asked about licensing – They will be using the Apache License and Contributor agreement.
Just for fun I googled Open Liberty and this Ice Skating club came up first. When I googled Open Liberty Alliance the portal list of Open Source projects came up.
Identity Gang Dinner at RSA
I am heading to RSA this year to cover the show for DIDW. Last year was my first dip into all out ‘security land.’ I was glad to hang out with Bob and Pam who helped me understand things there. It occurred to me that it might be fun to have an Identity Gang Dinner one night of the show. This will be both for folks on the list and those at RSA who might be interested in getting to know what we are up to.
Web of Compassionate Discretion – from my Bob Blakley interivew.
My interview with Bob Blakley from the RSA Conference last year has finally made it up on Stodid. It is a great interview and covers some key concepts that seem more important to remember then ever like The Web of Compassionate Discretion.
I am at MashupCamp3 in Boston facilitating and got together with Aldo to chat about identity. He brought a hard drive and I transfered this file from the device to his drive and he transformed to a readable format and edited it. We also recorded some advertisements for the Internet Identity Workshop in May 14-16.
Since I go to many many events these days. I hope that I can do a few more face-to-face interviews here and there to contribute to Stodid. Perhaps more ‘streeters’ with developers and others who might actually use the systems we are working on.
Hopefully now I can actually get my device to podcast workflow working but I am still not sure. Failing to navigate the ins and outs of podcast “literacy” w the reason for the long delay. The device I have is an Olympus recorder recommended to me by a friend for podcasting. The thing is that it has a format it recorded in WMA was one that I had no way to play on my machine. Even if I could play it I didn’t know how to edit it.
URL's are cool.
Apparently some people think that I don’t like URL’s. I truly think they are great. I have since the first I heard about them. I am very excited that this model for doing SSO now exists. I think the model is very empowering truly (except for the domain name part) decentralized. I think it will be great for millions of web literate folks. Weather they have their own domain or if they just have a blog and use that URL. The way wiki travel is doing it to support interop between the different wiki travel sites is cool too.
I want to see this model flourish.
It is true that I am also not a technical person and I don’t think that they will work for ALL people (they will work for many millions of people). This is a Yes AND situation. The AND is I don’t think it will work for ‘everyone’ and particularly the user communities that I got inspired to try and build social networks for the Spiritual Activists. There are lots of web-literate folks on this list who can weave their way through domain naming and setting up stuff on their servers. I feel that part of my role is to speak up for those who are less technically savy and what could work for them in a ubiquitous identity layer. I would like to see the diversity of identifiers and ways of doing SSO flourish under OpenID. I really want a ubiquitous user-centric identity layer that can serve a diversity of people.
I had a conversation with a friend of mine yesterday. She is in her 50’s and we talked about the different things going on in our professional lives. I shared a little bit about what was happening in OpenID. I told her about this new way of doing SSO with URLs and that in the universe of possibilities there was also i-names. She said to me that she thought the URL thing would never work for her mother. That is who I care about…her mother. So went I say I like i-names and I think they will work as a way to for spiritual women over 45 to use these systems I really am just talking about those folks in a different part of the web. Who normally don’t have non-tehcnical allies on their side as these things are formed thinking about what might work for them in a ubiquitous identity layer.
Please don’t take what I say as against anything else that lives under the OpenID2 umbrella. I really love the fact everyone has found a way to cooperate despite their different angles. It gives me great optimism for the future of the web.
Corporations plan to contribute Open Source OpenID
This was a great to see from James McGovern:
In terms of my own planned 2007 contributions to open source, I will be commiting to contributing to the authorization specification as part of the OpenID community. The funny thing is that I will be going against my better judgement in that enterprises tend to desire to contribute to things that are measurable like implemented software as we really can’t do anything with ideas alone. Ideas need to be turned into software. What I fear the most is folks from Sun such as Pat Patterson, Sara Gates,Simon Phipps, Robin Wilton, Don Bowen and folks from Microsoft such as Kim Cameron and Jason Matusow openly supporting initiatives such as OpenID but not taking deliberate steps within their respective employers to actually implement the OpenID specification and any resulting authorization enhancements. I too am somewhat constrained in that the perception of anything that isn’t implemented will be perceived as an academic exercise that was a waste of time that will put the ability to contribute to open source projects in the future at risk…
XFN, Liberty 2.0 and OpenID UX
Eran Sandler has two great posts about identity and OpenID. One links to my post on “the network of Me.” He asks if we can do ‘creative things’ with XFN and identities. I personally don’t want my identifier in anyone else’s XFN file. I want to be asked by the person if I want my relationship with them expressed in a new context. All our relationships do not exist in all contexts….there is however often a lot of overlap between people with whom we share multiple contexts – making these relationships traverse contexts in a privacy protecting and non-annoying way is the challenge. I hope that people interested in how identities, social graphs and social portability will go to the Free Liberty 2.0 meeting on January 22 to learn more about their proposed open standard for this.
He also blogs eloquently about the still emerging challenge of UI and OpenID adoption.
I keep on seeing two distinct ways that are common in such sites/services (at least in the sites that I’ve visited).
The first, is to separate the OpenID handling to a different page. In that page the process of sign-in/up is actually the same. If this is your first time of signing in with your OpenID it will actually transform itself to a sign-up process and may ask you a couple of questions and may interact with your OpenID provider.
The second, OpenID is integrated only in the Sign-In screen. If you sign in with an OpenID for the first time you will actually get a sign-up process and you may be asked a few questions and have an interaction with your OpenID provider.
The best place, of course, is to have OpenID in both the Sign-In and Up screens, if a user that do have an OpenID reaches any one of these screen the scenario of signing in for the first time (or not for the first time) will work no matter when he is.
What do you think? How would use design these processes that will still fit to your site/service and still support in a clear and obvious way OpenID?
There is an emerging community that is focused on User Experience. I hope that Eran and others who care about this join up. We need all the UX brains we can get on this not easy to solve puzzle.
Why i-names? I think they work for my people.
There is a follow up post here on how URL’s are cool.
It is no secret that I happen to like i-names. They are an open standard that I think has a lot of promise to help people have more control of their identifiers on the web. I will start out with a story and go on to a few practical reasons why.
I first ‘got into’ identity it was 2004 and I was helping spread the word about the upcoming Planetwork conference – where we were going to demo a really early clugy version of i-names doing SSO between 3 systems AND talk about the Identity Commons and how it could evolve. I got my first ever VOIP phone call from Owen who was in Greece and he sent me all their documentation to date- so I could write a summary for the brochure and website. (Over the holidays I went through papers and found the folder where I had printed out all that old stuff it was fun to reflect back and realize how much had changed since then. ) I wrote a great one page summary and they liked it a lot – it was the best conscious articulation about what they were doing they had seen. This was a year after that Augmented Social Network White Paper was published – I had read it and absorbed it throughly and wanted to ‘build’ that vision for my community.
I don’t just abstractly care about this stuff. I want people and communities that I care about to have identity services that meet their needs and make them more effective in the world. In 2002 I founded a project to build such networking tools – we actually did do two prototypes in Drupal by 2005. We were early to market and those folks were not ready for what we were offering (I may turn my attention back to serving this community in 2007).
There was no other user-centric identity anything except for the i-names guys and Identity Commons who were working closely together. I got along with everyone and enjoyed their spirit and energy. So I joined – I started working for Owen Davis evangelizing for the ‘first’ Identity Commons. I will admit looking back I was perhaps ‘overly’ enthusiastic and a bit naive about where the technology was. I was having a conversation with a friend in the community saying…”you know thinking about it if I had known what I know now I am not sure I would have done that job”. His response was well “that is why the young kids get things done – they don’t know better.” I think he is right on this. I also must say I have no regrets about the path I have taken the last three years. Indeed I think I have found myself and a place in the world that I really make a difference.
The user-centric identity community has really grown and flourished in the past 2 years. Thanks to the energy and support of Doc, Phil Windley, Phil Becker, Eric Norlin, Kim Cameron, Brett McDowell and many others. It has been exciting to watch it evolve.
Johannes has been particularly instrumental in bringing the ‘web based identifier’ user-centric crowd to convergence. Like all technical communities people come at things from different angles. He is a deep sceptic about anything new. He has been patient and listened to Drummond and the other XRI guys and has come to see some real value in what they are putting forward here are two posts one on XRI resolution and the other on XDI. Phil Windly also a thoughtful voice in the space has written about how he has come to understand their offering. This is a post about attending Andy Dale’s XDI workshop. His post about i-names at IIW starts out “Over the last few years, I’ve been impressed by a new Internet naming convention called XRI, or eXtensible Resource Identifiers”.
The convergence of LID, OpenID and XRI/inames into one thing called Yadis – to reduce end user confusion is a really great thing (of course Sxip joined the party later and this too reduced confusion even more and is also a good thing). I think the choice to not continue with the ‘Yadis brand’ and go back under the OpenID brand is a good thing…it is a much nicer brand. It also means that the people coming to this need to get that OpenID now includes these other ‘threads’ in the ‘web based identifier’ way of doing things for end-users. I think this diversity is good. If you don’t want to use i-names don’t but let the diversity flourish.
On a more practical level why do I like i-names?
I think i-names are easier to get for the marginally internet literate:
It may be news to folks but there are some internet users who don’t know how to scroll. There are not a whole lot of super literate users – we hang out with a lot of them in silicon valley but normal people….they are not like us. I think there are a bunch of bloggers who are going to ‘get’ that the URL they have for their blog is something they can use to login to other blogs to comment etc. That is cool. I think it is going to be the majority of OpenID users in the next year. I also really think that it is going to be a lot easier for regular folks to ‘get’ i-names.
Domain names system usabilty sucks:
I think that the domain name system and the tools for normal people to work in it are atrocious. I can hardly get things to work right and I am reasonably tech literate. I don’t know how to do domain mapping so that identitywoman.net is the URL that you see when you look at the top of my blog – rather then the http://www.kaliyasblogs.net that you see cause I can only figure out how to forward it. I can’t figure out for the life of my how to transfer domains from one registrar to another or merge the 4 accounts I have on one registrar into one. IT IS TOTALLY NOT USER FRIENDLY. Maybe by some miracle the UI and architecture can be changed – you know I am not betting on it.
i-names are less confusing then URL’s:
So lets go back to the community that I got started with trying to serve. They are very social people they come together at groovy conferences and go on retreats at spiritual places. They are web mail and Yahoo group users. They need systems and tools that are truly empowering and meet them where they are at with web-literacy. I think i-names have a better chance of doing this then URL’s. For starters they will have to ‘get a URL’ then use it a bunch of different places – each of those places will have URL’s for their profile in that system. People have multiple URL’s and clearly not all of them are OpenID enabled. I would rather just give them all community i-names then they clearly understand this new ‘thing’ (it is not a URL and not an e-mail address) is what they use to login different places and manage identity services from (like profile management when that happens).
I can upgrade and not loose my name:
I like the fact that I could start out with a community name like @integrativeactivism*morningglory and use that on several sites around the web and then….decide you know i want a top level name just for me … so I go and get =morningglory and all the logins that I have under that other community name don’t break. The i-number under @integrativeactivism*monrningglory is mine and can be resolved to =morningglory.
Group membership and micro-app ecology:
I also like i-names because from my understanding there is a way to assert group membership by the issuance of an identifier that one has control over. This gives you the potential weave together networks of applications for different communities that you are in. For example the solstice planning group could all have i-names @integrativeactivism*solsticeplanning*morningglory Then the wiki they went to to organize could be not on the same platform but work non-the-less for the people in that group. I really want to see an ecology of mico-apps that can be woven together and manage access control in ways that work for “simple people.”
Simple workable tools for personal link management:
The example from Phil’s blog explains a lot about how it is simple and I think it will work for the spiritual woman over 45 who are part of those communities that I care that these systems work for.
Lately I’ve started to feel like i-names and XRIs are coming into their own. Not long ago, for example, my i-name registry, 2idi, started offering XRI forwarding services. That means that I can create XRIs from my i-name that resolve to other things on the Net. For example:
http://xri.net/=windley/(+index) forwards to my “index” page on the Web.
http://xri.net/=windley/(+contact) is my contact page
http://xri.net/=windley/(+blog) resolves to my blog
http://xri.net/=windley/(+call) points to me on Skype (i.e. Firefox will launch a call to me through Skype if you click on this.)
http://xri.net/=windley/(+feed) forwards to my RSS feed
http://xri.net/=windley/(+photos) points to my online photo collection
What’s the point? Easy: I own =windley, my i-name, for the next 50 years and I control the resolution. If my blog URL or my Skype handle changes, I can change how those XRIs resolve and you can still find me and all the service related to me. Plus, the XRIs above are (mostly) based on a standard semantics, so if I know your i-name, I can easily find your blog.
XRIs are more complicated than URLs, but I remember everyone screwing up their face when URLs were new too and somehow we got used to them. XRIs make up for their additional complexity in semantic mappings and flexibility.
I must also chime in and say that I agree with Marc Canter
I’m also getting tired of waiting for ‘attribute sharing’ working.
I hope we can get this next layer of tools working relatively quickly now that we have the authentication layer stuff figured out. I am hopeful that the open standards for Datasharing that are getting traction now in the nonprofit community. I spent most of the last two weeks working organizing and writing up note cards of quotes from the vast repository of papers I have on the Open Social Network. I have an outline of a paper that I hope to have a working draft released in the next few months. As for my ‘enthusiasm’ I really want this vision to materialize and I am more committed then ever to reality based thinking and action so it can happen.