Rick Ringel (yes this is his real name) presented this Declaration of Network Independence at etel that will resonate deeply with the user-centric identity community.
Declaration of Network Independence
that among these are
Identity -> Existence -> Life
Mobility -> Movement -> Passage -> Freedom -> LIberty
And the pursuit of Innovation
Unalienable Right to Identity – Independent of devices, modes, service providers or access networks – Equality
Unalienable Right to Identity – Create, destroy and transfer ownership – Property
Unalienable Right to Identity – Control When, How, What and With Whom – Privacy and Association
Unalienable Right to Mobility – Move between services providers while retaining identity – Liberty
Unalienable Right to Pursue Innovation – End Users have a right to creat applications that interact with the Network on their behalf, or on behalf of many Users – Individualism.
We mutually pledge to each other our Vision, Our Standards, and our Interoperability.
Identity
WikiPedia's psydo Identity
I came across this article and it highlights wikipedia’s approach to Identity.
Wikipedia tracks unregistered users’ IP addresses — which, with a court order, can usually be traced back to a real-world identity — because it has no other way of telling if a slew of trash articles are coming from a single source. Wikipedia does not track the IP addresses of registered users because their pseudonyms serve the same purpose. So requiring people to log in will make them more anonymous, not less. But it will enable Wikipedia’s reputation system to operate more effectively on new entries. And it will cut down on the ~5,000 new entries created every day, of which about 3,500 are obvious junk (“Asdfasdf” is a particularly popular entry) quickly weeded out by the Wikipedians who patrol the site.
Allowing unregistered users to edit existing articles plays into that reputation system. Says Jimmy: “Why do we allow anonymous users to edit existing articles when we know that the flow of edits from anonymous users is worse than from logged-in users? It implicitly self-selects trolls because we see the IP number but not the login name.”
Jimmy thinks the the mainstream media misunderstood this story because they have a cognitive problem when it comes to anonymity and accountability:
The thing that people always latch onto is that it has to do with anonymity. But it doesn’t have to do with knowing who you are [in the real world] . We care about pseudo-identity, not identity. The fact that a certain user has a persistent pseudo-identity over time allows us to gauge the quality of that user without having any idea of who it really is.
Trying to find out who people really are is a fool’s mission on the Net. You could get a credit card ID but that doesn’t even tell you very much: This is Bob Smith of Missouri. But if an editor identifies himself as Zocky [the handle of a trusted Wikipedian], I know it’s good even though I don’t know who Zocky is [in the real world] because I know Zocky’s history on the site. I know he’s not a spammer, I know he’s not making things up — at least within the value of “know” that’s relevant in this case.
….The media have a cognitive problem with a publisher of knowledge that modestly does not claim perfect reliability, does not back up that claim through a chain of credentialed individuals, and that does not believe the best way to assure the quality of knowledge is by disciplining individuals for their failures. Arrogance, individual heroism, accountability and discipline … those have been the hallmarks of the institutions that propagate knowledge.2
Interent 2.0 – deep cultural consequences
I have been reading Sherry Turkles book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. The ironic thing is that it was written in 1995 before the Web really took off and became mainstream. I am going to finish it over my retreat. So far she has gotten me to reflect on the nature of our relationship to machines and how children growing up relate to machines. She has been studying their interaction with them over several decades and in different cultural contexts. I am reminded her work when reading Internet 2.0: the economic, social and cultural consequences of the new Internet
There are 4 levels to this model.
Disintermediation, Long Tail – which are concepts in wide circulation already. When it gets interesting is around Reformation and Continuous Presence.
The Internet is a reformation machine. It will create new fundamentals of and for our world. It change the units of analysis and the relationships between them
I think it does a good job of articulating the challenge to the ‘shape’ of our cultural dynamic.
The reformation model says fundamental categories of our culture (particularly the self and the group and the terms with which we think about them) are changing…. This is a change in the basic terms of reference, the very internal blue print with which we understand and construct the world.
Continuous Presence
One way to assess innovations is to make a guess about where we are headed. I think our economic, social and cultural destination might be this: we will be continuously connected to all knowledge and all people with a minimum of friction, and priviledge will be measured, in part, by how good are the filters with which we make contact with all but only the people and knowledge we care about.
The Trial is real for those on the No-Fly List
To follow up on the Orwell post…
Daniel Solove has a great book out about digital identity and the challenges that we face today with it. He likens the situation we face with our digital dossiers to that of The Trial as opposed to they typical Orwellian metaphor – often apt but not the only applicable one. This reality is all to familiar for those trapped in the hall of mirrors called the ‘No Fly List.’ …..
Sarah Zapolsky was checking in for a flight to Italy when she discovered that her 9-month-old son’s name was on the United States’ “no fly” list of suspected terrorists.
“We pointed down to the stroller, and he sat there and gurgled,” Zapolsky said, recalling the July incident at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C. “The desk agent started laughing…She couldn’t print us out a boarding pass because he’s on the no-fly list.”
Zapolsky, who did not want her son’s name made public, said she was initially amused by the mix-up. “But when I found out you can’t actually get off the list, I started to get a bit annoyed.”
She isn’t alone.
According to the Transportation Security Administration, more than 28,000 people have applied to the TSA redress office to get on the “cleared list,” which takes note of individuals whose names are similar to those on the terrorism watch list, but even getting on that list does not guarantee an end to hassles related to the no-fly list.
The TSA does not reveal how many or which names are actually on the list, and complaints do not get names removed, since those names are also those of suspected terrorists. The best that innocent travelers can hope for is a letter from the TSA that it says should facilitate travel but is no panacea.
In addition to babies, the victims of mistaken identity on the no-fly list have included aging retirees and public figures such as Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, Republican Rep. Don Young of Alaska and Democratic Rep. John Lewis of Georgia.
“It’s a significant problem,” said Brenda Jones, the spokeswoman for Rep. Lewis, who travels by plane at least twice a week. She said the congressman had written to the TSA, but “he is still on the no-fly list, and the problems persist.”
Secretive list
While the number of suspected terrorists on the list is unknown, aviation sources estimate that it includes tens of thousands of names, if not more.
TSA spokesman Christopher White said the agency has seven people working full-time on processing applications to get on the cleared list. Considering the number of applications, that works out to less than 4,000 complaints per redress officer.
“We do take the cleared list very seriously, and it’s also important for us to focus on the right people. It does us no good to focus on the wrong John Doe,” White said.
Cleared individuals receive a letter from the TSA saying, “we have provided sufficient personal information to the airlines to distinguish you from other individuals” but cautions that “TSA cannot ensure that your travel will be delay-free.”
John Graham, a 63-year-old former Department of State official, said his TSA letter had not helped at all.
“I’m at a point now where I don’t really care whether my name is on the list as a mistake, as mistaken identity or whether someone at TSA does intend to hassle me. The fact is, there’s a total absence of due process,” he said.
The American Civil Liberties Union calls the no-fly list system unconstitutional, saying it treats people as guilty without a trial and unfairly deprives them of freedoms. It also says the system is an inaccurate and ineffective security method.
Despite efforts by the TSA to address complaints and concerns about the no-fly list, ACLU attorney Reggie Shuford said very little had changed to improve the process.
“We continually hear from people being caught up on the no-fly list with the same frustrating experiences and inability to get off the list,” he said.
Peter Johnson, a retired bibliographer at Princeton University, said travel became “hellish” after he discovered his name was on the no-fly list in August 2004.
“I’m not sure if what’s behind this is an effort to simply control people or if it’s largely mismanagement and poorly conceptualized programming,” Johnson said, adding that a TSA official had told him that there were more than 2,000 other Peter Johnsons in the United States who reported similar problems.
This week: Identity powder keg in California
While we will be hanging out at Syndicate this week singing “Kum Bah Ya” about new “standards” for micro content and structured blogging and the announcement about i-tags. There is an impending “identity powder keg” that could go off this week in Califorina (and across the country) with the pending execution of Tookie Williams on Tuesday December 13th.
I googled – “Identity” and “Tookie” some interesting articles came up. They get to the heart of one element of ‘identity’ to have a meaningful place in a socio-cultural context. To be seen by others (afterall identity is what others say about us).
From Black News.com:
In a candid, and revealing moment, Stanley “Tookie” Williams told a visitor at San Quentin prison that he helped found the notorious Crips street gang because he wanted to smash everyone, make a rep, get respect and dignity, and that he wanted his name to be known everywhere. He got his wish in more ways than he ever dreamed of. The demons that drove Williams in his reckless push for identity and prominence also drove him to become the nation’s best known condemned prisoner. He faces execution December 13 for multiple murders.
William’s revelatory glimpse into his thug past tells much about the anger, alienation, and desperation that have turned legions of young black men into social pariahs, and that propel them to wreak murder and mayhem in mostly poor, black communities. But today’s Tookies didn’t crop up from nowhere. The transformation in the early 1970s of the old-line civil rights groups into business, and professional friendly organizations, and black middle-class flight from the inner city neighborhoods, left the black poor, especially young black males, socially fragmented, politically rudderless, and economically destitute. Lacking visible role models of success and achievement, and competitive technical skills and professional training to compete in a rapidly shifting economy, they were shoved even further to the outer margins of American society.
Open CMS Summit
The guys at Bryght (they are really bright) are organizing an Open CMS Summit in February. It is a great idea. (They have on their list of things to talk about ‘identity and authentication – in fact it is on the top of their list. RIGHT ON)
I would like to ad and expand on the list. These communities coming together are diverse and have a range of needs. It is not just ‘developers’ coming together to code together.
- Small business owners who are building businesses based on these platforms. This community has needs to address real client needs that can sometimes be overlooked by the ‘core’ developers – I hope we can create a space for these real issues to be surfaced and action to be taken.
- Individual developers who work on contract for a range of projects.
- designers who have a skill set to build sites.
- User experience people who have an enourmous amount to contribute (the FLOSS Usability sprints have gone a long way to addressing the wide gap between open source and usability.)
- Project managers that pull teams together with a whole variety of skill sets.
- Folks developing platform in specific niches that have real gifts to bring the community – remember that the margins are where the really interesting things.
Face time amongst this diverse groups needs to be used to
- Develop vision about the platform – this will help the community develop consensus and confidence in the platforms survival
- Listening to emerging needs that end users and communities using those platforms and weaving those into development roadmaps
- Learning about usability and how to meet weave this into development roadmaps
- Business models for businesses? how do we make money to eat, feed those who work for us and better yet THRIVE?
- How do we share information about development we are working on? (a new module or feature that others might also need to develop)
- What are the collaborative flows that really support the core development and meet their business goals.
Technorati Tags: Bryght, Drupal, identity, nptech, Opensource, usability
Its official – we had our Birthday
Doc wrote this great post up about Identity reaching the STAGS – Subject That Actually Goes Somewhere about a year ago. There are great things coming up next week is an XRI/XDI workshop Dec 5th. pre Syndicate workshop on identity Dec 12th details coming soon.
identity workshop audience
I have been working hard to spread the word about the workshop Andy is leading on December 5th about i-names. One of the folks I passed it along to is Paul Hogan of Exponent Partners who do strategic and tactical consulting, and helps design solutions, selecting and implementing the right technology in the nonprofit sector. Here is his articulation of the market need and who should be at the workshop.
All of our clients want to have data from web-based applications (i.e. transaction processing, membership management) as well as basic forms (i.e. registration, surveys, etc.) integrate automatically with the back-end database, in our case Salesforce and potentially CiviCRM. I’d love to see you guys certify applications that are compliant with these standards and give them a stamp of approval so that we could use them for clients.
The way the agenda looks, your audience really ought to be the ‘product managers’ and execs of folks like Salesforce, CiviCRM, CivicSpace, Democracy In Action, Radical Designs, CrownePeak, everyone building add-on modules to Drupal & Mambo, the dozens of membership management software vendors, etc.
December Five Dive into i-names and Datasharing with Andy Dale "Mr. XDI"
On Monday December 5th in the afternoon Andy Dale is leading “deep dive” into i-names and datasharing using XRI and XDI.
The Goal
The goal is to explain the technical aspects of XRI and XDI to potential techincal implementors of these open standards. Supporting single sign on, doing basic datasharing and other key elements like i-brokers. He will do this by articulating practical applications that he and others are building (See below). You will get to connect with others exploring using these standards and share information with them.
Who is Andy?
Andy builds enterprise software and within the last 8 months has been working on building enterprise quality applications using these tools. He articulates these standards with amazing clarity and has real experience.
When
The event begins at noon with “bring your own lunch” and the program will begin at 1 pm.
Where
It will be at ooTao’s offices in Alameda. 3rd Floor, 1080 Marina Village Parkway.
Cost
FREE! (because we love you and want to offer a barrier free opportunity to learn more and join the community of implementors in a face-to-face way). All you have to do is RSVP to Justine [ justine.hirsch *at* ootao *dot* com] and come.
Agenda
This agenda and address is on the wiki and will be updated. Please go there and ad more about what you want to learn and how this 3 hours can be of most benefit to you.
There are 3 basic levels of integration, or engagement, that are possible with the evolving social and dataweb standards:
- Single Sign On
- Publish data from your system
- Consume Data Shared from other systems
We will explore these implementations in detail by reviewing these 3 use cases:
Signing in using Single Sign on:
This use case will let us set the landscape of the basic i-name infrastructure; i-brokers, service providers, xri resolution and yadis resolution.
Publishing data from a system:
Giving someone that donates money on-line a signed record of their gift.
This use case demonstrates publishing data from a system. The data is provided to the userso that they can share it with other systems as they see fit . This shows basic XDI syntax and permissioning.
Getting email addresses from a user’s XDI profile:
This case demonstrates how to either use your existing database as an XDI cache or make XDI calls in place of conventional SQL calls.
Technorati Tags: Amsoft, Collaboration, identity, ootao, Planetwork, XRI, XDI
O'Reilly's thoughts on Identity in the context of Web 2.0
I just read through Tim’s five pager on Web 2.0 and found the highlights that relate to Identity.
Meanwhile, startups like Sxip are exploring the potential of federated identity, in quest of a kind of “distributed 1-click” that will provide a seamless Web 2.0 identity subsystem…While the jury’s still out on the success of any particular startup or approach, it’s clear that standards and solutions in these areas, effectively turning certain classes of data into reliable subsystems of the “internet operating system”, will enable the next generation of applications.
A further point must be noted with regard to data, and that is user concerns about privacy and their rights to their own data. In many of the early web applications, copyright is only loosely enforced. For example, Amazon lays claim to any reviews submitted to the site, but in the absence of enforcement, people may repost the same review elsewhere. However, as companies begin to realize that control over data may be their chief source of competitive advantage, we may see heightened attempts at control.
Much as the rise of proprietary software led to the Free Software movement, we expect the rise of proprietary databases to result in a Free Data movement within the next decade. One can see early signs of this countervailing trend in open data projects such as Wikipedia, the Creative Commons, and in software projects like Greasemonkey, which allow users to take control of how data is displayed on their computer.
I hope that Identity Common’s who’s founding principles assert this Freedom loud and clear can lead the way on this.
Users must be treated as co-developers, in a reflection of open source development practices (even if the software in question is unlikely to be released under an open source license.) The open source dictum, “release early and release often” in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, “the perpetual beta,” in which the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis.
Lightweight Programming Models
There are several significant lessons here:
Think syndication, not coordination. Simple web services, like RSS and REST-based web services, are about syndicating data outwards, not controlling what happens when it gets to the other end of the connection. This idea is fundamental to the internet itself, a reflection of what is known as the end-to-end principle.
It’s easy to see how Web 2.0 will also remake the address book. A Web 2.0-style address book would treat the local address book on the PC or phone merely as a cache of the contacts you’ve explicitly asked the system to remember. Meanwhile, a web-based synchronization agent, Gmail-style, would remember every message sent or received, every email address and every phone number used, and build social networking heuristics to decide which ones to offer up as alternatives when an answer wasn’t found in the local cache.
Halley and I talk Identity – Podcast from BlogHer
One of the highlights of BlogHer for me was my first podcasting experience with Halley Suitt. I was sitting around at a ‘podcasting’ station and she showed up and the John Furrier who runs PodTech was there and so we did a spontaneous recording… here is the result. Wow! listening I actually don’t mind my voice.
How do we make the internet a trusted place?
Is the net a more dangerous place for women?
Halley discusses her digital identity experiences – writing about sex on the net, and lingerie photos of her on the net.
I mention the founding of Virtual Rights to address this new era of personal representation online. I share what inspires me how we can use these tools to empower us as citizens.
Live from Accelerating Change – DataTao, i-name Cell phone
I am blogging from the soon to be open Accelerating Change Conference.
Andy gave me a ride down here and we talked about the announcement last week of DataTao.
DataTao is going to be an interoperable data hub for user controlled data. DataTao is primarily about programmatic access to an individual’s data and only has as much UI as is needed to richly support its base functionality.
So why do I call it an ‘interoperable’ data hub? That’s because DataTao is designed to act as a bridge between many of the current identity protocols. While DataTao will provide storage for people that don’t have their data stored and available from elsewhere, its main purpose is to consume and forward data from its authoritative source(s).
It is my opinion that DataTao is a necessary and required next step in the evolution of the DataWeb. While DataTao by itself is NOT a compelling application it is a needed piece of infrastructure. It will hopefully encourage and enable people to build internet 2.0 applications and maximize the leverage of those already built.
In order to drive adoption DataTao will provide some Apps that use the DataWeb for persistence in conjunction with the DataTao launch. These apps have not been finalized yet but will likely include Exchange and Mac Mail integration (Self updating address books) as well as a rich interface for person to person profile information sharing (i-share).
I got to meet Ajay of AmSoft for the first time and see the i-names being used on the a cell phone. This is push to communicate asserting preferred mode of communication.
Creating:
* Choice
* Privacy
* Control
Technorati Tags: AC2005, identity, Web2.0, ootao, Amsoft, i-phone, mobile, celphone, puppy
Digital Identity 'performance' by college kids
Danah Boyde has a great post about Face Book – (an online social network only for those how are in college.) This paragraph really stood out for me because it highlights the social phenomena that those of us who typically work in digitial identity do not really ‘do’ – DIGITAL IDENTITY PERFORMANCE…
The Facebook is situated in a culture with a set of known practices and needs, helping students make sense of their universe and constantly changing social networks. Even the issues around performative profiles are dampened because college students are so engrossed in digital identity performance as a process of figuring out who they are. Between MySpace and The Facebook, teens are now growing up assuming social network tools and building the value into them but most adults have no interest; herein lies another age division that will certainly affect the future of technology use.
She also wonders about how the practices emerging in these educational facebooks can perhaps be picked up by corporate ones to make them more effective.
Unfortunately, in the corporate culture, tools are being built to only reflect a fraction of the networking practices – they are poorly aligned and dreadfully unflexible. It’s funny though – every big company tends to have a facebook of sorts – reporting charts, roles, seat assignments. What if those could grow to indicate projects and past cooperations between colleagues? What if non-salesman could articulate their relationships to people in other companies rather than having them uncomfortably sussed out via email? What if social networking tools were built into the already existing corporate framework? What would it mean to make the corporate facebooks more useful?
Technorati Tags: identity
IAA – TIA continues and PATRIOT expanded?
Surveillance society quietly moves in
It’s a well-known dirty trick in the halls of government: If you want to pass unpopular legislation that you know won’t stand up to scrutiny, just wait until the public isn’t looking. That’s precisely what the Bush administration did Dec. 13, 2003, the day American troops captured Saddam Hussein.
Bush celebrated the occasion by privately signing into law the Intelligence Authorization Act – a controversial expansion of the PATRIOT Act that included items culled from the “Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003,” a draft proposal that had been shelved due to public outcry after being leaked.
Specifically, the IAA allows the government to obtain an individual’s financial records without a court order. The law also makes it illegal for institutions to inform anyone that the government has requested those records, or that information has been shared with the authorities.
“The law also broadens the definition of ‘financial institution’ to include insurance companies, travel and real-estate agencies, stockbrokers, the US Postal Service, jewelry stores, casinos, airlines, car dealerships, and any other business ‘whose cash transactions have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory matters’ “ warned Nikki Swartz in the Information Management Journal. According to Swartz, the definition is now so broad that it could plausibly be used to access even school transcripts or medical records.
“In one fell swoop, this act has decimated our rights to privacy, due process, and freedom of speech,” Anna Samson Miranda wrote in an article for LiP magazine titled “Grave New World” that documented the ways in which the government already employs high-tech, private industry, and everyday citizens as part of a vast web of surveillance.
Miranda warned, “If we are too busy, distracted, or apathetic to fight government and corporate surveillance and data collection, we will find ourselves unable to go anywhere – whether down the street for a cup of coffee or across the country for a protest – without being watched.”
Sources: “PATRIOT Act’s Reach Expanded Despite Part Being Struck Down,” Nikki Swartz, Information Management Journal, March/April 2004; “Grave New World,” Anna Samson Miranda, LiP, Winter 2004; “Where Big Brother Snoops on Americans 24/7,” Teresa Hampton and Doug Thompson, Capitol Hill Blue June 7, 2004.
Censored – or bogus? (see below) was a caveat to caveat offered to the above story. I would like to know what others in our network/community know about this and see if the identity community can uncover what information is actually is being shared with government about our day to day personal transactions without our awareness.
Some stories get ignored by the mainstream media because they’re too controversial, or too much of a challenge to the rich and powerful, or just too hot to handle.
But some stories get dismissed because they’re just not credible – and unfortunately, one of the pieces Project Censored cites this year appears to fall into that category.
Almost everything on the Project Censored list is well sourced and, at the very least, plausible. But one of the stories listed under “Surveillance Society Quietly Moves In” is a piece titled “Where Big Brother Snoops on Americans 24/7.” Written by Teresa Hampton and Doug Thompson, the piece was published on www.capitolhillblue.com, a Virginia Web site that’s been around since 1994.
The piece makes some pretty spectacular allegations. Hampton and Thompson claim not only that the Pentagon is defying Congress and covertly operating the notorious Total Information Awareness program (TIA) (which Congress explicitly killed), but also that the feds now monitor “virtually every financial transaction of every American,” in real time (that is, as it’s happening). They also maintain that the Pentagon uses the information to launch investigations of “persons of interest” and as a basis for adding names to the Transportation Security Administration’s “no fly” lists.
It’s pretty far-fetched to think that the Pentagon could run an operation so vast as to review almost every financial transaction in the country as it happens. But beyond that, the American Civil Liberties Union has filed two suits against the feds trying to pinpoint just how it collates TSA’s “no fly” lists and still hasn’t been able to figure it out.
The principal sources Hampton and Thompson base their story on seem to be an anonymous “security consultant who worked on the … project” and an “Allen Banks” – someone identified simply as a “security expert,” without any detail as to who he is or how he would be privy to such information.
Thompson, who is the site’s publisher, defended the accuracy of the story, saying that he’d spoken with “over 30 sources” – police, banks, credit card agencies – and that he reached his conclusions based on those sources as well as on the fact that there were “too many coincidences.” (None of that is explained in the story.)
“To some extent,” he added, “it was a conclusion by me, looking at the links.” Banks and other private industries had been instructed to e-mail data to the feds under TIA, and they continued sending data to the same places after TIA was killed, because they never received orders to stop, Thompson said. His caveat: “If I had to go into court and prove this, there’s no way I could prove it.”
We’re still dubious.
CTT
Technorati Tags: Patriot Act, surveillance, TIA
July Planetwork FOCUS on DIGITAL IDENTITY TOOLS
July Planetwork FOCUS on DIGITAL IDENTITY TOOLS
Thursady, July 28th doors at 6, program at 7
CIIS, Namaste Hall,3rd Floor
1453 Mission St. San Francisco (2 blocks from Civic Center BART)
With my emerging persona as Identity Woman curated this line up that provides a great opportunity to learn more about some of the latest tools for next generation digital identity.
Light Weight Identity – LID
Johannes Ernst NetMesh Inc. .
Light-Weight Identity(tm)– LID(tm)– a new and very simple digital identity protocol that puts users in control of their own digital identities, without reliance on a centralized party and without approval from an “identity provider”.
OpenID
Brad Fitzpatrick Six Apart, Ltd.
OpenID, a decentralized identity system, but one that’s actually decentralized and doesn’t entirely crumble if one company turns evil or goes out of business. An OpenID identity is just a URL.
Sun Single Sign On
Pat Patterson Sun Microsystems
Sun is announcing the intention to open source web single sign-on. This project, called Open Web Single Sign-On, or OpenSSO, gives developers access to the source code to these basic identity services allows them to focus on innovations that solve more urgent problems, such as securely connecting partner networks, ensuring user privacy, and proving compliance.
Opinity, Inc
Ted Cho
Opinity provides open reputation for end users. It is a young start up offering free online reputation management related services so that individuals can authenticate, aggregate, and mobilize their website (eBay, Amazon, etc.) reputations. Opinity also offers reputation management tools so that individuals can monitor, build, and work to enhance their own reputation going forward. Individuals can also review other individuals at the Opinity website.
_______
Planetwork has been hosting monthly networking forums in the Bay Area for the last 3 years. We are a unique network sitting at the nexus of technology use for social and environmental good. To support the monthly forums we invite voluntary donations (in a basket on the food table).
If you would like to join our mailing list to get more information about upcoming events please go to this page and get a planetwork i-name and then set your mail preferences.
Catalyst: Taoism and Identity
One of the most interesting things here at Catalyst has been the expression taoist quotes related to the identity.
Today’s Opening Slide
The Tao of Identity
Though thirty spokes may form a wheel,
it is the hole within the hub
which gives the wheel utility.
It is not the clay the potter throws,
which gives the pot its usefulness,
but the space within the shape,
from which the pot is made.
Without a door, the room cannot be entered,
and without windows it is dark.
Such is the utility of non-existance.
From yesterday
The Tao of Identity
The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name…
We Cannot know the Tao itself,
nor see its qualities direct,
but only see by differentiation,
that which it manifests.
-lau tzu
——-
We also had some Tarot reading the first evening… who knew this crowd had spirituality flowing through it.
Identity and Gaming
To prepare to talk with Susan Crawford I thought I would scan her three year old blog for any menitons of Identity. It turns out that Susan has done some extensive thought about identity and in particular in the context of online gaming. She has a link to a paper – Who’s in Charge of Who I am?: Identity and the Law Online. Here are some good quotes…
Online identities are emergent. Identity is by definition a group project, something created by the context in which the identified operates.
Online walled gardens will be come more prevalent, as concerns about security, viruses, spam and the unknown increase, as valuable content is made accessible only to those who have been permissioned to see it, and as hardware and software systems made available to the masses increasingly taken on “trusted” aspects. Online games are precursors of these future more serious, walled garden online worlds. Key characteristics of both games and walled worlds are limited access, clear boundaries, rules, roles/players, and feedback mechanisms that create reputation. … These characteristics of games make them ideal laboratories for experimentation with rulesets.
This is a great mention of the word – rulesets. I have been thinking a lot about them ever since I read Thomas Barnett’s book – The Pentagon’s New Map. How we as a society and how institutions that govern us determine what the ruleset’s are is important to think about. With the complexifying world we live in – robust, legitimate and fair systems to create good rulesets are needed. This is particularly true in the online space that is really built by and for us. I hope that all the effort that has gone into creating the Identity Commons structure can be just such a place.
Back to Susan…
Who owns identity? who owns reputation? From the intermediary’s perspective, software creates rules that control what social context can be moved elsewhere. Your identity is “really” a database entry, and the intermediary can argue that your identity is their intellectual property, not yours. You may attach great importance to it, but this identity (and its reputation) will not as a practical matter survive outside the world in which it was formed. Walled world designers have incentives to raise switching costs and capture all the vale of this reputation. In other words, controllers of online worlds are gods. But users may defect from environments and attempt to constrain them in how persistent their reputations and identities are. The difficult task for developers/intermediaries is how much freedom to give their users. This takes us from the realm of risks to the realm of opportunities.
AS real work becomes a more common online activity, identity created in connection with groups will be more and more meaningful.
Human nature will always tend toward group-ness.
- What would be made visisble? The fact that someone’s identity has been taken away, and the reasons why? Or speech-related actions of the intermediary that have an impact on identity (but are less then “disappearing” someone?)
- What about reputation? Is it right that a user must leave her reputation behind when she leaves a particular online world? Is “reputation portability” possible? Or is reputation so context-dependent that the online world should be permitted to own it? And what does the online world own exactly? A group-created construct?
- Is this entire problem avoided by staying out of “walled gardens” and maintaining our own domains? Will this be possible, as online worlds become more and more attractive, and as hardware and software increasingly intertwine?
In the end, it boils down to the fact that the best government is the one that you can trust, which will be the one you know personally: the people close to you in your virtual community, who are held accountable precisely because of community ties. Your best government is going to be each other, because the man behind the curtain isn’t going to know any more than you know him.
Conculusion:
We are still in the early stages of the first two steps dealing with any technology: fear and opportunism. Enlightenment is not far away. I want to suggest that we skip quickly through the fear, linger on the opportunism, and move on to human betterment. This social benefit may come (as so many things do) from playfulness. Games have a great deal to teach us about how we establish and maintain identity. Now we need to consider who is in charge of these identities. It may be, in the end, that we are.
We need to forge a direct link between how we live and work online (especially within walled gardens) and how we structure control over online resources. If the new mode of work online is collaborative peer-production of resources, who will own a shared online space of identities? This ownership may have to be collective. The fundamental problem that is yet to be address is that while reputations and identities are group projects, legal ownership of collectively-created intangible identities currently appears to reside (by default) in online intermediaries. We may need to make some noise about this and ensure a better fit. Perhaps the game should belong to the players.
She raises some interesting questions for us to think about. I think looking at the governance and how to actualize that – this is what the distributed governance form of Identity Commons is designed to do. I didn’t really realize that she was involved with XNSORG several years back. She really liked you all and mentioned Bill Washburn and Drummond Reed by name.
While talking with her about identity and her paper she mentioned her connection to the State of Play conferences. The third one is coming up this fall and is entightled Social Revolution. Two panels look very relevant:
- Collective Action in the Metaverse: Groups, Community and Power
- Identity in the Metaverse: On-Line Identity in Virtual Worlds
It is the day after Web 2.0 but might be worth the trip 🙂
Chris hasn't blogged either
I don’t feel so bad now…I see that Chris Cepi has not blogged since DIDW either. His last post highlights such as:
Best Semantic Transformation: Kim Cameron swapping “reify” for “thingify”
Most Predictable Vendor Behavior: Awkwardly inserting the recent Identity Theft instances into product and company pitches – for products and companies that do not provide technology that would have prevented any of the examples cited.
I missed Chris’ presentation cause I just was over tired and couldn’t find a plug at the back of the room. I promise I will make it to the next one.
I noticed visiting his blog that Thomas Barnett is in his blog roll – rad thinking our the state of our world related to connected and disconnectedness.