One Web Day – why it matters to me and how it relates to Identity

This post was invited by the folks at One Web Day to be the ambassador for the day and talk about why it matters to me. The post will also appear on their website so it has more details then if it were just for this blog.
Since I first heard about one web day I was struck that it followed Interneational Peace Day September 21. I am not sure if Susan Crawford realized th this when she founded one web day. I think it is happy coincidence.
At the first Planetwork Conference in 200 called Global Ecology and Information Technology I “got” the potential of the web to play a role in supporting people of the earth being able to share information to make their lives better and to address the critical environmental/climate challenges we face. Information sharing on one internet that is global in scope is critical for this.
My participation in the identity community has its origins in Planetwork community (other people in the identity community have different origin stories around their initial interest in the subject). Part of their thinking was about how to support environmental groups could work better together via the web. An open identity layer on one web could really help with that – by supporting people being able to interact with multiple groups with out multiple disconnected identities. (You can check out a slide show I did recently at the Net Squared Conference that covers this).
Over the past 4+ years that t I have been working in online digital identity I have learned more then I ever imagined about enterprise systems and the critical nature of identity for managing all the people that they interact with (employees, contractors, business partners, customers). I have developed a great appreciation for the critical role that business plays in making all the things we depend on. Business is evolving and beginning to take the internet for granted – e-commerce is no longer just that it IS commerce. One web is critical for our economy.
If the web degrades and becomes more then one web – if the nets that make up the internet decouple then our ability to support the emergence of an identity and relationship layer of “the (one) web” ends. That would be terribly sad.
So I invite those of you in the identity community to get behind one web day – check out organizers starter kit and 10 ways to help the web and the Project Proposal page.
I invite those of you in the wider web community reading this post to learn a bit more about our work to help the ‘one’ web evolve at:
* Identity Commons (links to a bunch of projects here),
* Liberty Alliance,
* Information Card Foundation and
* OpenID