I had a great day on Tuesday at the Corante Symposium***
We opened with this quote and I think it is basically true
Managers would rather live with a problem they can’t solve than with a solution the don’t fully undersand or control.
Eric Bonabeau
Comments on the panel:
From Educause
Kaliya talked about a new data web that links to persistent data. For me that elicited thoughts of Plaxo, microformats and XHTML. I may have misinterpreted her, but I believe she was projecting a growth in commodity skills and contract labor. 

Let’s talk about customers… companies in e-transactions get all the data on customers. This thread reminds me of the medical records data ownership controversy.
Liz posted about the “hollywood model” comment I made and how these was a wondering if this was actually a good thing.
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Lunch followed and Bud and I enjoyed a good conversation over that he blogged.
I shared with him the use case that I have been seeking to solve ‘since the beginning’ and is why I am so enthusiastic about identity.
The community that I am seeking to serve with my nonprofit
attends conferences but these are all put on by different but similar organizations. Why should these people who might show up at 4 different organizations over a year have to enter a different profile across all those activities.
This apparently has continued to resonate.
Also, I continue to be tremendously intrigued by Kaliya Hamlins’ ideas for creating identities. What I envision here is that people create a profile or publish a profile that they think fits with the conference. They then use this identity for this conference and others like it so that you can find new resources via people you met at the conference. Obviously, SPAM potential is high, but the idea is intriguing.
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Other interesting panels included Kevin and Mary on this question – How do we scale meaning? They opened with this quote from Bruce Sterling.
Ultimately no human brain, no planet full of human brains, can possibly catalog the dark, expanding ocean of data we spew. In a future of information auto-organized by folksonomy, we may not even have words for the kinds of sorting that will be going on; like mathematical proofs with 30,000 steps, they may be beyond comprehension. But they’ll enable searches that are vast and eerily powerful. We won’t be surfing with search engines any more. We’ll be trawling with engines of meaning.
Liz Lawly posted these great snippets for her talk on the question of is social software a mirror or a lens.
We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us. Winston Churchill
This is true of social software they shape us.
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finally the cocktail party headline – Identity women were popular at the symposium. I was asked by him if I was into ‘identity’ as in identity politics. I was like … nope. Apparently others at the event where.
***(except there was no outgoing SMTP – so they were so kind to actually open the Harvard interent in the one room we were in but for future reference “open wifi” means open outgoing SMTP)
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