The article that Martin Richards was working about OpenID at the last IIW was finally published in Infomation Week One Web, One WebID. It summarized the confusion in the market well. My dad – who knows nothing about the space summarized the article well (the capital letters are his)
From the article it looks like there is quite a way to go before there is a more secure system that is both WIDELY adopted and VERY secure to everybody’s satisfaction.
I say in the article I am ever optimistic about things becoming clear and harmonized
All of these plans will one day fit together, says Kaliya Hamlin, a freelance identity consultant who organizes the biannual [sic] Internet Identity Workshop and maintains a primary hub for the identity community. At the moment, however, at least to the layman, they form a bewildering jigsaw with lots of unconnected pieces and no unifying design.
I also know that markets and communities are not things you control. We can bring order to this space and I hope to continue to do so with my efforts in this community.
I was thinking about about the evolution of the community and the world-view/cultural differences that we have among us. I went back to surf through some of what Meg Wheatly had online to see if there was something that captured the essence of the model of organization we are working with. I thought with her experience coming from the corporate sector and doing organizational development work in large fortune 500 companies and her research into now living systems work she might have some words that articulate the essence of what we are doing with this model.
These few lines particularly jumped out at me form this interview with her:
The real eye-opener for me was to realize how control and order were two different things, and that you could have order without control… To understand order that arises, rather than order that is imposed through direction and control — that is a very significant new path.
I realized that was what we were doing with the Identity Commons organizational model – supporting the emergence of order rather then trying to control what happens. The question we are trying to solve how to have an identity layer/framework/social norms/standards for the internet and other digital systems is a HUGE and complex problem. It has not been solved by control and won’t be. However creating a space for order and clarity to emerge – for self organizing around different ideas, ways of doing things – and resourcing collaboration, cooperation and harmonization efforts WILL get us there faster then not having that space.
The process of articulating to the community – what you want to do – and how you want to do it – this creates accountability. This helps us see ourselves and what is going on in the community through the simple light weight formal processes and with these processes order emerges.
From the conversation today I articulated some further clarity. The whole point of having a loose collaborative space with a shared brand is to support stuff innovating not having the big corporations playing in the space approve every use of the Brand.
It is to support ideas bubbling and percolating and not feeling like one group or company needs to control that other group over there does or might do in the name of the organization.
In a group/organization agreeing to participate in Identity Commons, that group is making a commitment to collaborate and share information. Agreeing to participate one does not have to “AGREE” to all uses of the brand. In fact THE BRAND IS ABOUT THE COMMITMENT TO COLLABORATION and sharing along with a “meta’ out there future vision we do agree on but as we struggle to get there we KNOW we will might not agree. What we do agree on is a shared set of VALUES that are striving to be part of the technologies being built along with a recognition that as technologists that there is a scope and dimension of identity that goes well beyond “tech” because it is about people and our social nature.
Identity Commons was founded to provide this kind of support for a community of collaborating projects across a range of disciplines and not to be an industry trade association or a technical standards body.
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