Reflections on IIW

Facilitating the Internet Identity Workshop was a wonderful experience. I got to bring help the order emerge out of the chaos by leading Open Space. Many felt that it was
About two weeks ago I started making a map of the history of the community. This was in part because I knew a lot of new people were coming to the workshop and I wanted to be sure they had some context of who we were and where we had come from. I translated this into an interactive wall map that allowed people to ad their own elements to the history.
On the timeline:

• Yellow diamonds are protocols
• Pink Trapazoids events that have happened on a timeline
• Purple papers are Publications white papers
• Purple 1/2 circles are podcasts.

Clusters (ot on the timeline):

• Green Parallelograms are mailing lists
• Blue pages are blogs

There are some good photos of this but I will be taking the results and putting them into Omnigraffle and then PDF too.
Tuesday Morning we got to put together the agenda. It involves everyone who wants to present putting what they want to have a session about on a piece of paper. They speak their session title to the whole room and then post it on the wall.
It wasn’t until about mid day on Tuesday that I actually landed and was able to engage in the conference. The Planetwork folks talked a lot talking about the emerging 1society project.
Dinner both evenings was great. Monday was Italian and Tuesday was Thai.
The Identity Commons crowd moved things forward we have a follow up call next week.
At the very end watching and listening to Paul and Drummond go over the relationship between Higgins two projects and XRI / XDI was a great treat.
We concluded our day listening to Eugene Rant about Wikis at Wiki Wednesday. After dinner Meng told us he had founded the Reputation Gang and we invited him to be a part of the Identity Commons.
The highlight to get the essence of what happened is the closing session recorded. Here Tuesday and Wednesday.
Some high complements were given to the conference.
From Kim Cameron:

With Doc Searls and Phil Windely navigating at the macro-level, the amazing Identity Woman Kaliya orchestrated an ”unconference” that was one of the most effective events I’ve ever attended. It’s clear that creating synergy out of chaos is an art that these three have mastered, and participants floated in and out of sessions that self-organized around an ongoing three-day hallway conversation – the hallway actually being the main conference room and event! So we got to engage in all kinds of one-on-one (and few) conversations, meet new people, work out concerns and above all work on convergence. Many people told me they felt history was being made, and I did too.

Opinity’s Tom Madox reflected on the conference today.

Now, before someone reprimands me for implying that there were corporate or technical bigshots in attendance, let me clarify that one. There were, in fact, luminaries of various sorts participating: A-list bloggers, well-known corporate folks, technical experts working at the forefront of innovation in the field of identity mangement … people like that. However, and this is the point: they were not on stage, performing. They were at the tables and in the rooms, talking, listening, asking and answering questions. In terms of social interaction, the conference hierarchy was flat.

Phil Becker wrote in the DIDW newsletter:

This week I saw a significant “state change” occur in this year and a half “Identity Gang” evolution, and it tells me things are going to start to happen. Some of those involved will be happy this is so, others most likely won’t be. But for those not directly involved (i.e. most of the population) it was, in my opinion, a tremendously significant moment in the evolution of the identity conversation, and one that will have many significant ramifications going forward – though these will likely take another year to become clear to those not paying close attention.
They are working on the issues of what form identity must take
to become ubiquitously deployable, become something that will be adopted
comfortably by users, and how we can ever get there from here.
The first sign that the required significant shifts are occurring is
visible in the titles of the sessions this un-conference produced on
its first day. These titles have all subtly shifted in ways that
indicate there is no longer any question that there is a single,
over-arching story behind the identity conversation, and that the
mission now is to figure out how to converge the many efforts that
are underway. These efforts were each begun with a very different
mission and with a very different use/case and problem set driving
them, and this has previously created division and competition. This
time, however, it was clear that everyone was looking for where they
should get on board, and how to avoid having their goals left out.

Technorati Tags: conference, identity, iiw2006, iiw, workshop, XDI, XRI, YADIS