I was one of the first people to congratulate Chris Messina on his blog when he announced he was going to Google. It was a personal congratulations. I wasn’t sure if it was good overall for the open web vision or the community as a whole. In the end after thinking about it for a few days I feel it is a good move for them, for Google and for the community. The rest of this post explains why.
With Chris going to Google it gives them three seats on the OpenID board (Joseph and Chris are both community board members and Google has a corporate paying board member seat filled by Eric Sachs). It concentrates a lot of power at Google and I agree with Eran’s concerns from Marshall’s RWW/NYTimes article …why be “open” if you can just have an internal product meeting with Brad Fitzpatrick and a few other Googlers and “ship” a product without reaching out to others. I agree with the concern and I think there will be enough eyes on these individuals in particular and Google in particular to challenge them if they do that.
Thursday morning I sat at “geek breakfast” in Berkeley with a friend discussing Chris and Joseph’s move to Google. We mused about how many people we knew who “get social” have been at Google and because “Google didn’t get social” they were unhappy so they left, Kevin Marks being just the latest example leaving in the fall for British Telecom/Ribbit where he works for JP Rangaswami, the CIO who really gets open.
Given this, if “just” Joseph Smarr was going to Google he would be more “alone” trying to “do social right” at Google. Yes, he would have allies but no one quite as high profile as himself. With Chris Messina there too, there are now two major committed community leaders who can work the politics involved in helping Google to “get” social and actually do it right. If anyone has a hope inside that big company it is those two and I don’t think either could be as effective alone.
If Chris and Joseph fail, that is if they get frustrated and leave (which they can at any time they want cause they are very “employable” because of their profiles by a whole range of companies in the valley) then is a sign that Google doesn’t really “get” social and isn’t moving in the right direction in terms of supporting the emergence of an open standards based, individually empowering & social web.
With Zuckerberg’s statement’s about privacy and the recent actions by Facebook to make user-information public, Google has a huge opportunity to live up to its slogan of “not doing evil”. Over the fall Google made some promising statements on the meaning of open and took action spinning up the Data Liberation Front.
I know many people who currently are and have been at Google. All of them talk about how secure things are internally – it is not possible to go into their systems and “look up a user” and poke around at what they have in their e-mail, or what they have searched on or what is in their google docs. Algorithms look at people’s stuff there, not people. Google takes their brand and reputation for protecting people’s private information seriously. I am not particularly starry eyed about Google thinking they can do no evil – they are just a company driven by the need to make a profit. I worry that they might be becoming too dominant in some aspects of the web and that there are legitimate concerns about the monopoly power they have in certain market area.
I don’t see this as a Google vs. Facebook fight either. Chris, Brad, Eric, Joseph are all at Google & David Recordon and Luke at Facebook; they are all good friends socially and are just six people in the overall identity community made up of about 1000 people at 100’s of companies. Yahoo!, AOL, Microsoft (enterprise & MSN side), are all involved along with PayPal, Amazon, BT, Orange, Mozilla, Sun, Equifax, Apple, Axiom, Oracle, & many many more. They all come together twice a year at the Internet Identity Workshops and other events to collaborate on innovating open standards for identity on the social web.
I invite those who want to participate in the dialogue to consider attending the 10th Internet Identity Worskshop May 18-20.
I take the health of the identity community, its over all tone and balance quite seriously. I helped foster it from the beginning really starring in March of 2004 including 9 months from June of that year until January 2005 it was my first major job – evangelizing user-centric identity and growing the community to tackle solving this enormous problem (an identity and social layer of the web for people). I along with others like Doc Searls, Phil Windley, Drummond Reed, Bill Washburn, Mary Ruddy, Mary Rundle, Paul Trevithick, Dick Hardt, Eugene Kim & many others formed the identity community. Having put my heart, soul, sweat and tears into this community and working towards good results for people & the web, I don’t say what I say in this post lightly.
OpenID
IIW is NOT an advocacy group – sigh “the media”
Facebook’s Online Identity War quotes me and labels IIW an advocacy group. IT IS AN INDUSTRY FORUM. Douglas MacMillan.
Sorry but I am still learning “how” to talk to reporters. They don’t like to quote me as “the identity woman” and link to my blog.
I “do” run the Identity Workshop with Phil and Doc but that doesn’t make it an “advocacy group”
Identity Commons & IIW have a purpose and principles believing in user/centric identity. The power of individuals to manage and control their own identities online. We don’t “advocate” for them – we create a convening space for people who want to work on this ideal.
Facebook does on some level “agree” with the idea of user-centric identity – Luke Shepard has participated in the community for quite a while & they hired David Recordon. They sponsor IIW.
I am clear that the opening up of previously controlled information with no warning “jives” with my understanding of user-centric control. It was more from my own point of view I was commenting. That is with my “identity woman” hat on… and the values I carry from Planetwork and the ASN… but the press hates that. Uggg. Chris Messina gets to be an “open web advocate”… that is what I do to but just about identity “open Identity advocate” (mmm…) but then that sounds like “just” OpenID and it isn’t just about that one particular protocol. sigh.
I am still wondering – How does one “belong” and have “titles” in a way the media can GROK when one does not have a formal position in a formal organization.
sigh – identity issues.
What are identifiers in the digital context?
Jean Russell and I continued our conversation on What are Identifiers this time focusing on the digital context.
We cover what user-names are, how they are not portable, what it means to have a portable identifier – and talk about the open standard that enables portability – OpenID.
It is up on the Reputation Currents Blog.
FastCo Post on Governemnt Experiments with Identity Technologies
This is cross posted on Fast Company.
The Obama administration open government memorandum called for transparency participation, collaboration and federal agencies have begun to embrace Web 2.0 technologies like blogs, surveys, social networks, and video casts. Today there are over 500 government Web sites and about 1/3 of them require a user name and password. Users need to be able to register and save information and preferences on government Web sites the same way they do today with their favorite consumer sites, but without revealing any personally identifiable information to the government.
Yesterday the United States Government in collaboration with industry announced a few pilot projects using emerging open identity technologies for citizens to use when interacting with government sites. I use the word interacting very deliberately because the government doesn’t want to know “who you are” and has gone great lengths to develop their implementations to prevent citizens from revealing personally identifiable information (name, date of birth etc).
How would you use this?–well imagine you are doing an in depth search on an NIH (National Institute of Health) Web site–and you went back to the site many times over several months. Wouldn’t it be great if the site could “know” it was you and help you resume your search where you left off the last time. Not your name and where you live but just that you were there before.
The Identity Spectrum helps us to understand how it all fits together.
Anonymous Identity is on one end of the identity spectrum–basically you use an account or identifier every time go to a Web site–no persistence, no way to connect the search you did last week with the one you did this week.
Pseudonymous Identity is where over time you use the same account or identifier over and over again at a site. It usually means you don’t reveal your common/real name or other information that would make you personally identifiable. You could use the same identifier at multiple sites thus creating a correlation between actions on one site and another.
Self-Asserted Identity is what is typical on the Web today. You are asked to share your name, date of birth, city of residence, mailing address etc. You fill in forms again and again. You can give “fake” information or true information about yourself–it is up to you.
Verified Identity is when there are claims about you that you have had verified by a third party. So for example if you are an employee of a company your employer could issue a claim that you were indeed an employee. You might have your bank verify for your address. etc.
The government pilot is focused on supporting citizens being able to have pseudonymous identities that function only at one Web site–the same citizen interacting with several different government Web sites needs to use a different identifier at each one so their activities across different government agencies do not have a correlation.
It is likely that some readers of this blog know about and understand typical OpenID. Almost all readers of this blog do have an openID whether they know it or not because almost all the major Web platforms/portals provide them to account holders–MySpace, Google, Yahoo!, AOL etc.
So how does this work with OpenID?
Typically when logging in with OpenID on the consumer Web you share your URL with the site you are logging into–they redirect you to where that is hosted on the Web–you authenticate (tell them your password for that account) and they re-direct you back to the site you were logging in. (see this slide show for a detailed flow of how this works). Using OpenID this way explicitly links your activities across multiple sites. For example when you use it to comment on a blog– it is known your words come from you and are connected to your own blog.
Using the OpenID with Directed identity–de-links your the identifiers used across different sites but still lets you use the same account to login to multiple sites.
When you go to login to a site you are asked to share not “your URL” but just the name of the site where your account is–Yahoo! or Google or MySpace etc. you are re-directed to that site and from within your account a “directed identity” is created–that is a unique ID just for that Web site. Thus you get the convenience of not having to manage multiple accounts with multiple passwords and you get to store preferences that might be shared across multiple ID’s but you don’t have identifiers that correlate–that are linked across the Web.
How does this work with Information Cards?
This is a complementary open standard to OpenID that has some sophisticated features that allow it to support verified identities along with pseudonymous & self asserted identities. It involves a client-side piece of software called a selector–which selector helps you manage your different identifiers using a card based metaphor, with each digital “card” representing a different one. Citizens can create their own cards OR get them from third parties that validate things about them.
The government is creating a privacy protecting “card profile” to be used in the pilot program. It is NOT issuing identities.
Trust Framework are needed to get it all to work together.
From the press release yesterday:
“It’s good to see government taking a leadership role in moving identity technology forward. It’s also good to see government working with experts from private sector and especially with the Information Card Foundation and the OpenID Foundation because identity is not a technical phenomenon–it’s a social phenomenon. And technological support for identity requires the participation of a broad community and of representatives of government who define the legal framework within which identity will operate,” said Bob Blakley, Vice President and Research Director, Identity and Privacy Strategies, Burton Group. “Today’s announcement supplies the most important missing ingredient of the open identity infrastructure, mainly the trust framework. Without a trust framework it’s impossible to know whether a received identity is reliable.”
The OpenID Foundation and Information Card Foundation wrote a joint white paper to describe how they are working on developing this. From the abstract:
[They] are working with the U.S. General Services Administration to create open trust frameworks for their respective communities.
These frameworks, based on the model developed by the InCommon federation for higher education institutions, will enable government Web sites to accept identity credentials from academic, non-profit, and commercial identity providers that meet government standards. These standards are critical as they represent the government’s resolution of the challenging and often competing issues of identity, security, and privacy assurance. Open trust frameworks not only pave the way for greater citizen involvement in government, but can enable even stronger security and privacy protections than those typically available offline.
These are all exciting developments but there is much more to do.
Looking (far) ahead there may be the opportunity to do selective disclosure–combining anonymity with verified identity.
How do these go together–you can take a verified identity claim say your birth date then using cryptography strip the specifics away and just have a claim that says you are “over 21”. Then using an anonymous identifier you have selectively disclosed your age without giving away your date of birth.
You could imagine this would be handy for citizens wanting to communicate their opinions to their member of congress without revealing their actual name and address – they could “prove” using a verified claim they live in the district but not reveal who they are. This aspect of what is possible with the technology is VERY forward looking and will take many years to get there. There is enormous potential to evolve the Web with this emerging identity layer.
I would like to invite all of you interested in being involved/learning more to attend the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View California November 3-5. I have been facilitating this event since its inception in 2005. It is truly amazing to see how far things have progressed from when we were 75 idealistic technologist talking about big ideas. at the Hillside Club in Berkeley. It is also some what daunting to think about how much farther we have to go.
Celebrating with OIDF & ICF
This evening I was fortunate enough to be invited to attend the joint OpenID and Information Card Foundation dinner. It was fun to connect with everyone and it really meant a lot to me to be there. It has been a long journey as a community since the first Internet Identity Workshop in Oct 2005.
IIW IX is open for business
Internet Identity Workshop number 9 is coming up in about 10 weeks. November 3-5 (Tuesday to Thursday) in Mountain View California at the Computer History Museum.
We are excited about all the developments in the industry with protocol evolution in the social web space AND larger and larger scale deployments of open identity technologies including OpenID and Information Cards.
There will be much to talk about at this fall’s event.
Early REGISTRATION is Open! UNTIL SEPTEMBER 16 then prices go up by $50-75
Early Bird Prices are….
- $274 regular tickets
- $148 for independents
- $ 50 for students
We need to get 75 people registered by September 16 to make a final confirmation for our conference space at the Computer History Museum.
Special this year we have the “BIG” ticket for those can expense $998 (but can’t convince marketing to sponsor). This is a GREAT way to support IIW!
IIW is a completely community driven event – we don’t pay anyone for marketing – the community is our marketing.
Please put our LOGO ON our blog our WEBSITE.
Follow IIW on Twitter – @idworkshop
SPONSORSHIP OPPORTUNITIES ARE STILL AVAILABLE!!! Please contact Phil if you are interested in learning more phil@windley.org
JOIN THE COMMUNITY MAILING LIST
THE INVITATION TO IIW!
The Internet Identity Workshop focuses on “user-centric identity” and netizen empowerment on the social web trying to solve the technical challenge of how people can manage their own identity and social activity across the range of websites, services, companies and organizations that they belong to, purchase from and participate with.
This is where everyone from a diverse range of projects doing the real-work of making this vision happen gather and work intensively for three days. It is the best place to meet and participate with all the key people and projects. This is a comprehensive list of the technology communities that are covered.
The event does not have a pre-set agenda instead as people register they are asked what they would like to present about, learn and discuss with peers/industry experts. These are all collected here . The first morning of the conference will be introductory orientation about key projects and technologies in the community. After that the community creates the agenda itself using the Open Space Method. Dinner both Tuesday and Wednesday are a big part of the conference.
Here are links to notes that cover most of the sessions from the last two conferences IIW #8 spring of 2009 IIW #7 fall of 2008
These documents are great resources for convincing your boss of the value of this event.
The heart of the workshop is a practical idealism in working towards the shared vision of a decentralized, user-oriented identity layer for the Internet.
Because the web was built around “pages”, no tools or standards were created to control how the information about you was collected or used. At the Internet Identity Workshop we bring the people creating these tools and standards so people can safely manage their online identity and control their personal data.
It is not about any one technology – rather it is a place to discuss multiple interoperating (and possible competing) projects, standards, and networks for identity, data sharing, and reputation.
As part of Identity Commons, the Internet Identity Workshop creates opportunities for both innovators and competitors. We provide an open forum for both the big guys and the small fry to come together in a safe and balanced space.
There are a wide range of projects in the community:
- Open conceptual, community, and governance models.
- Open standards and protocols.
- Open source projects.
- Commercial projects.
- Projects to address social and legal implications of these technologies.
- Efforts to rethink the business models and opportunities available with these new technologies.
User-centric identity is the ability:
- To use one’s identifier(s) on more than one site
- To control who sees what information about you
- To selectively share presence and profile information
- To maintain multiple identities and personas in the contexts you wish
- To aggregate attention, navigation, and purchase history from the sites and communities you frequent
- To move and share your personal data, relationships, documents, and other publications as you wish
All of the following are active topic areas at each IIW:
- Improving Existing Legal Constructs Privacy Policies Terms of Service
- Creating New Legal Constructs – Limited Liability Personas, Identity Rights Agreements
- Creating New Business Models – Identity Oracle, I-Brokers
- New Citizenship Perspectives – Activism Community, Event Coordination, Community Identity and Data Sharing
The Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) was founded in the fall of 2005 by Phil Windley, Doc Searls and Kaliya Hamlin. IIW is a working group of Identity Commons The event has been a leading space of innovation and collaboration amongst the diverse community working on user-centric identity.
Identity for Online Community Managers
I was asked by Bill Johnson of Forum One Networks to kick off the discussion on the next Online Community Research Network call this week with the topic Identity for Online Community Managers – drawing on the presentation that I put together for the Community 2.0 Summit. I cover the basics of how OpenID, OAuth and Information Cards work, who is “in” terms of supporting the projects and what community managers/platforms can do. We will discuss the implications of these new identity and data sharing protocols on the call.
its that SXSW picking time of year
This year there are 2200 panels submitted for 300 slots. It is great they are going with community generated ideas for the conference. It is also hard to tell what will be happening in our fast moving industry 7 months from now. PLEASE go to SXSW create an account and then vote for these two 🙂
I put a lot of thought in to what to put forward this year knowing it would be 9 months out. One of the trends that is just starting to emerge is identity verification – my hunch is that by March this will be a topic getting a lot of attention and worth exploring at SXSW.
Who are you? Identity trends on the Social Web.
“On the Internet Nobody Knows You’re a Dog” Is this famous New Yorker cartoon still true? Twitter is doing verified accounts. Facebook claims everyone using their “real name” gives strong social validation ‘proof’. Equifax is validating age with information cards (digital tokens). We will explore the current trends and their implications for the future.
- What is identity?
- Why are people doing identity validation?
- Who is doing identity validation?
- Why are websites seeking people who have had their identities validated?
- Is identity validation improving the web?
- What are the current open standards in this space?
- Are approaches by men and women different about idnetity presentation and validation?
- What kinds of businesses are requiring online identity validation for customers?
- Is identity validation going to squish “free speech”?
- How is this trend changing the web?
With my She’s Geeky hat on: What Guys are Doing to Get More Girls in Tech!
The point of this is to get beyond the women say there are issues in the field and guys say there isn’t – to have guys who know there is an issue and are proactively doing constructive stuff to address it.
Many tech fields have a low percentage of women. If you are a guy do you wonder what you can do about it? Learn about successful strategies and proactive approaches for supporting women you work with and participate in community with. We will even cover some well-intentioned efforts that have gone awry.
- How many women by percentage participate in different technical fields?
- Why does it matter that they are underrepresented in these fields?
- What are the cultural norms that men and women have about performance and self-promotion?
- What is Male Programmer Privilege?
- What can a guy do who has a sister that is math/science inclined but being steered away from the field?
- How have the men on the panel improved things in their workplaces?
- How have the men on the panel addressed the challenges that arise in open communities? (that is where you don’t have a boss that fires people for inappropriate behavior/comments)
- What are the qualities of a workplace that is friendly for women?
- How to go beyond tokenism in workplaces, communities and conferences?
- How to encourage women more?
Other interesting Preso/panels covering Identity topics:
The Politics & Economics of Identity Put forward by my friend Liza Sabature of Culture Kitchen and the Daily Gotham Identity Politics” has always been left to the realm of feminist, civil rights activists, aka “minority politics”. This panel will explore the social and political ramifications of the business of identity and reputation. We will talk about the good, the bad and the ugly and what social entrepreneurs, businesses and digital activists are doing to impact this new economy.
- What is identity?
- What is reputation?
- What is privacy?
- How have big business historical monetized privacy?
- How social media works on identity and reputation?
- Online surveillance in the US : DMCA, FISA, Patriot Act
- Facebook BEACON : a study on how not to spy on people for fun and profit
- Google Adsense or Spysense?
- What are Vendor-Relationship Management systems?
- Will we need “Identity Management Systems” instead of VRMs?
Distributed Identity: API’s of the Semantic Web Without much conscious thought, most of us have built identities across the web. We fill in profiles, upload photos, videos, reviews and bookmarks. This session will explore the practical use of Social Graph API and YQL to build new types of user experience combining identity discovery and data portability.
Online Gatekeeping: Who Died and Made You King? by Liz Burr As the web becomes more open via social networks, we’re adopting new rules of communication. But who creates these rules? How much does class, race and gender figure into social media policing? We’ll discuss how identity affects social networks, as well as look at how online communities police themselves as participation expands.
- Which groups are in control of what is worth sharing via social media?
- Are the under-25 community using social media differently?
- How do we recognize and confront social media ‘gatekeepers’?
- Is our behavior in online communities merely a reflection of offline stereotypes and experiences?
- What is the impact of the amplification of social stereotypes online on under-represented groups?
- How do we integrate previously, under-represented groups into this more social world?
- Is there really such a thing as a “digital ghetto”? If so, is it our responsiblity to combat it?
OpenID: Identity is the platform is put forward by Chis Messina.
I have to say it is really great to have this be put forward so plainly and simply – to “get religion” about user-centric tdentity and its central role in shaping the fugure the social web.
Ignore the hype over social networking platforms and web OS’s! The platform of the social web is identity. Facebook and Twitter Connect are just the beginning of the era of user-centric identity. I’ll go beyond the basics of OpenID and learn how to effectively incorporate internet identity into your apps.
Your Online Identity After Death and Digital Wills
If you died tomorrow, would someone take care of your internet accounts? How do you tell subscribers the blogger has died? Every day people die and no one can access their email. Let’s explore what can be done to manage your online identity after you pass on.
- What usually happens to email accounts when a person dies? Policies for Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL
- What about WordPress.com and Blogger for digital policies concerning the death of a blogger?
- Do You have a digital will setup?
- Products and services to manage digital wills, electronic correspondence after death and auto replies.
- Grief, “You Have Mail” and online memorial services.
- Who owns blog content after the death of a blogger?
- How to calculate the worth of your website or blog.
- How can you manage your online accounts and passwords for easy access after you pass?
- What are some recent legal examples of online account ownership disagreements?
- How to keep your passwords safe?
How to Benefit from 1-Click Identity Providers by Luke Shepard from Facebook.
Sites across the Web are opening up to support open identity platforms, such as OpenID. How can companies at scale and those with large user bases successfully work with open standards including OpenID, Activity Streams and new social markup language specs? Can companies survive the challenges of incorporating OpenID into their websites?
- Are there any success stories with OpenID?
- What does the OpenID user experience look like?
- Who has implemented OpenID?
- What have been some of the failures of OpenID?
- What is OpenID?
- What are the user benefits of OpenID?
- How can websites educate users about open protocols?
- What are the privacy concerns around OpenID?
- What kind of user data is made available to sites when they implement OpenID?
- What will it take for OpenID to become mainstream?
Crime Scene: Digital Identity Theft
ID biz models "in the future maybe" says Johannes
Johanne Ernst is a builder of Identity technologies (and one of the clearest thoughtful thinkers about identity technologies and markets. He just posted a great post about business models in the identity space. I know he has at various times tried raise money as an entrepruner in this space – so he has thought a lot about the business models.
For those of you who don’t know Johannes he developed Light-Weight Identity (LID) a URL based ID system at the same time Brad Fitzpatrick did at Live Journal and then participated in merging it all together into YADIS discovery which became woven together with OpenIDv1, XRI/i-names and sxip to become OpenIDv2. He also was the first drawer of the identity triangle (OpenID, SAML, InfoCards) which evolved into the Venn of Identity.
Many people have ideas for value-added services that could be sold once sufficiently many users used internet identities at enough sites. The trouble is that the transaction volume for OpenID (or any other identity technology on the internet) is still far too low to make this viable.
The mot important sentence is this one – Let’s not confuse being majorly annoyed how long this is all taking (speaking about myself here) with something being fundamentally wrong (because there isn’t).
I take heart with what he has to say especially because he addresses it to a big part of what I do – organize (un)conferences to continue momentum for the field.
Value-added services:
Many people have ideas for value-added services that could be sold once sufficiently many users used internet identities at enough sites. The trouble is that the transaction volume for OpenID (or any other identity technology on the internet) is still far too low to make this viable.So the verdict here is: perhaps in the future.
So what’s an analyst, or conference organizer, or entrepreneur, or venture capitalist to do?
My take: Hang in there, keep the burn rate low, make no major moves, would be my advice. (Believe it or not, sometimes I’m being asked about my advice on this.) All the signs are pointing in the right direction, the latest being Google’s major OpenID push. Let’s not confuse being majorly annoyed how long this is all taking (speaking about myself here) with something being fundamentally wrong (because there isn’t).
Sooner or later, at least the value-added services opportunity will emerge. Perhaps others. But so far it has not yet.
Great Identity News
Yesterday the Government hosted a workshop in DC: Open Government Identity Management Solutions Privacy Workshop.
The OpenID Foundation and the Information Card Foundation are working with the U.S. General Services Administration to create open trust frameworks for their respective communities.
Drummond Reed and Don Tibeau announced their paper Open Trust Frameworks for Open Government.
Quiet and intense work has been going on since just before the last IIW on all this, so it is great to see it begin to see the light of day.
The OpenID Foundation had a wonderful new redesign that Chris Messina announced. This page really made me smile: Get an OpenID – Surprise! You may already have an OpenID.
Axel did a Wordle of it:
OpenID goes mainstream – Sears and KMart are now relying parties
This is really exciting news for the identity community since getting mainstream adoption of OpenID has been a challenge for the community. They worked with JanRain on implementing the project. Here is the RWW story.
I just went to the KMart site to “join”, and at first I thought it wasn’t there. Turns out the option to sign up with OpenID is below the fold; you have to scroll down to find it. This is disappointing – it turns out that many web users don’t actually know how to scroll! Facebook, Yahoo!, Google, AOL, Twitter, and MySpace are on the first set of options; OpenID and Windows Live ID are on the second.
I choose the OpenID option and entered my i-name (yes, I still use it) and it worked. I like the new “pop-up” method of supporting authentication – it does the redirection without taking you away from the website. I think the OpenID community is improving the UI by leaps and bounds.
One thing I don’t like is having to “pick a screen name” I always get stuck I went with Kaliya figuring that this would be a profile I would almost never use. I may delete it.
Congratulations!
IIW & Identity Community Bumps in the Road
This is cross posted on the IIW blog .
When we first started meeting (the early “seedling” meetings of community) at other people’s conferences, there were Microsoft people, Liberty Alliance/SAML people, Shibboleth implementers, user-centric folks (OpenID, LID, sxip, i-names/xri), big idea folks (Doc Searls), etc. We met for a couple of hours at a time and knew there was common ground, but knew we needed more time to really understand each other: to have more of a shared language and develop enough strength in the relationships in the community to work together. We figured we needed to have more time to meet together, so we convened the Internet Identity Workshop. That first event was amazing and quite formative – kicking off the conversation that would lead to OpenIDv2 via Yadis. Kim Cameron presented his 7 laws of identity that have become foundational to community thinking and introduced the idea of information cards and selectors; much work is now happening around this.
Soon afterward Brett McDowell the ED at Liberty Alliance approached me and Phil about having an Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) next to (the days following and in the same location) an upcoming Liberty Alliance meeting. We thought this was a great idea to create more space for people to meet about user-centric identity technologies and issues. When Microsoft got wind of this, boy did I get an earful – they felt that the neutrality of IIW would be totally compromised if it came to be that closely associated with Liberty Alliance (remember Liberty Alliance was originally formed by Sun and others in response to Microsoft Passport).
IIW had provided a forum for anyone working on user-centric identity technologies to come together without anyone making an “agenda” for the meeting or creating a “technology road map.” Literally anyone who came could put a subject on the agenda on the day of the event. All parties did want to increase dialogue and cross-pollination among the groups, and we found a way through by jointly (IIW and Liberty Alliance) producing what we named the Identity Open Space (we also said we would be open to co-producing with others who asked – we did two with Digital Identity World). It was in Vancouver Canada and Kim Cameron along with several Microsoft folks along with many in the user-centric community attended and because it was the two days after a Liberty Alliance meeting many Liberty people were also there, and it was a good event that moved the industry forward.
Right in the middle of getting this worked out – I on a personal level had a very intense experience being caught in the middle – a giant trade association on one side and Microsoft on the other. We (me, Phil, Doc, Kim, Brett) managed to navigate this as a community and do the right thing and we became stronger as a community for having done so.
We continued to have IIW’s every 6 months and in 2006 it was clear we were going beyond just IIW and needed a community home/container to connect community efforts and provide common services (blogs, wikis, bank account for doing common work like holding events). We held a series of conversations and decided to create a community organization, drawing on an existing one, Identity Commons – the community liked the purpose and principles approach for bringing people together. As a codition of brand transfer to a our nonprofit organization we worked on our version of purpose and principles. There were some delays in actually getting the organization legally formed and the brand transfered, but in 2007 we were an official organization: a network of organizations, initiatives, and projects all working on different aspects of a people-centric identity layer of the web. There are several places you can read about community history and background around Identity Commons. I wrote “What the heck is Identity Commons?”.
Next fall we are hosting our 9th event. Many things have move forward significantly in the community – OpenIDv2, OAuth, Venn of Identity paper, OSIS Interop, Concordia use-cases, Information Card evolution including Augmented Browsing with Action Cards, Portable Contacts, Open Social, OpenID/OAuth hybrid, Activity Streams, Distributed Social Networking, Discovery particularly XRD. So what has made IIW work so well in fostering the kind of collaboration and innovation that has emerged from it?
- We have kept the space free: no one has the ability to buy time at the conference.
- All ideas are welcome: there is no committee controlling the agenda, so politics about what is “on the agenda” or “not” just doesn’t happen.
- It is a working workshop to solve real problems, move technical projects forward and discuss interoperability among them.
- We put attention towards creating the space for relationships between people to form naturally over time and thus enabled trust to grow.
Getting OpenID to work – when oh when?
Joseph Boyle who came to our identity panel at sxsw and then joined us for lunch has been sharing with me some of his OpenID challenges. These happen all the time – ALL THE TIME. Thing is – he is a tech guy and he still can’t get any of this to work. I asked him to document his challenges so I could share them with you – he sent this to me and O’Reilly tech folks (that was where he was trying to login)… I am hoping that these UI issues can be resolved soon.
I was going to sign up at:
https://en.oreilly.com/webexsf2009/user/account/signup/attendee#
and saw a Sign up with an OpenID option. Since I’m interested in OpenID, I thought I’d try to use an OpenID associated with one of my Yahoo or Google accounts, but this is proving more difficult than I expected.
I did manage to find Yahoo’s page for turning on OpenID support for my Yahoo account and did this, getting response:Feeling geeky?When you log in to a website that supports OpenID login we’ll send your OpenID identifier to the website so it can identify you.To make things easy, we have generated this identifier for you:https://me.yahoo.com/a/T_HpXDQkssQpI_sR……………………..
You don’t need to save this identifier. While logging in to websites, you can simply look for a Yahoo! button or typeyahoo.com in the OpenID text field. You can also choose additional custom identifiers for your Yahoo! account below.Not geeky enough, apparently, as pasting the Yahoo-provided identifiers into your OpenID box gives errors:
Unable to find OpenID server for ‘https://me.yahoo.com/a/T_HpXDQkssQpI_sR…………………….’Unable to find OpenID server for ‘http://www.flickr.com/photos/josephboyle’
Help! What am I doing wrong? Thanks, Joseph Boyle
Internet Identity Workshop is announced May 1-3 in Mountain View
It seems only appropriate that while PC Forum is going on with the theme Erosion of Power: Users in Charge that the we are announcing the second Internet Identity Workshop.
May 1-3, 2006, Computer History Museum, Mountainview CA
Workshop Wiki
The Internet Identity Workshop focuses on user-centric identity and identity in the large. Providing identity services between people, websites, and organizations that don’t necessarily have a formalized relationship is a different problem than providing authentication and authorization services within a single organization.
Goals
The goal of the Internet Identity Workshop is to support the continued development of several open efforts in the user-centric identity community. These include the following:
* Technical systems and proposal like YADIS (LID, OpenID, Inames), MetaIdentity system, Infocards, and the Higgings Project
* Legal and social movements and issues like Identity Commons, identity rights agreements, and service providers reputation.
* Use cases for emerging markets such as user generated video (e.g. dabble.com), innovative economic networks (e.g. interraproject.org), attention brokering and lead generation (e.g. root.net), consumer preferences (e.g. permission based marketing), and civil society networking (e.g. planetwork)
The workshop will take place May 2 and 3, 2006 at the Computer History Museum. We will also have a 1/2 day on the first of May for newbies who want to get oriented to the protocols and issues before diving into the community. If you are new to the discussion, we encourage your attendance on May 1st because of the open format we’ll be using to organize the conference.
Format and Process
At the last identity workshop we did open space for a day. It was so successful and energizing that we will be using this format for both days. If you have a presentation that you would like to make or a topic that you know needs discussion in the community you can propose it here on the wiki. We will make the schedule when we are face to face at 9AM on May 2nd. We do this in part because the ‘field’ is moving so rapidly that we your organizing team are in no position to ‘know’ what needs to be talked about. We do know great people who will be there and it is the attendees who have a passion to learn and contribute to the event that will make it.
Part of the reason for moving to the Computer History Museum is to have better space for running this kind of effort with an expanding community. We expect a large and energized community to attend and are counting on plenty of participation. Don’t be put off by that, however, if you’re just getting into this. Come and learn. You won’t be disappointed.
Cost
We are committed to keeping this conference open and accessible. Having a venue that will support our doubling in size also means that it costs a bit more.
We decided to have a tiered cost structure to support accessibility as well as inviting those who are more able to pay to contribute. If you want to come we want you there. If cost is an issue please contact us and we can discuss how to make it work.
* Students – $75
* Independents – $150
* Corporate – $250
The fees are used to cover the cost of the venue, organization, snacks and lunch both days. We encourage you to pre-register since we will limit attendance at the event to 200 people. The IIW workshop in October sold out and we expect strong interest in this one as well.
Sponsorships
Our goal is to keep the workshop vendor neutral, but we will be accepting limited sponsorships for the following:
* Morning Break, May 2, and 3 ($800 each)
* Afternoon Break, May 1, 2, and 3 ($800 each)
* Lunch on May 2 and 3 ($2400 each)
* Conference Dinner, May 2 ($4000)
If you or your company would like to sponsor one of these workshop activities, or have ideas about other activities contact me. You will not get any extra speaking time for sponsoring but you will get thank-yous and community ‘love.’
Organizers
IIW2006 is being organized by:
* Kaliya Hamlin
* Doc Searls
* Phil Windley
The Brigham Young University Enterprise Computing Laboratory is providing logistical support and backing for this workshop.
Technorati Tags: pcforum
Arrival at etech – Lanyard Mashup and iname postcards
I just got into San Diego for eTech. I am in a very enjoyable tutorial by the Adaptive Path guys on Designing Web 2.0 applications.
The prime insight is that they are both informational hypertext systems and applications with a software interface. One must look at this duality throughout the development of the site on the stack from the must abstract – Strategy through Scope, structure, skeleton, surface – the most concrete.
I also got my 10th Sxip lanyard I have taken the liberty to do a Mashup adding the other Identity 2.0 protocols – OpenID, LID, inames, Yadis and front and center ID Gang. I took a photo you can see here.
We have new iname postcards promoting the developer portal that was launched today – content will be improving as the community contributes more.
Oh yes and as if that was not enough – we get to Sxip into our rooms – here is Phil with his Sxip Key. Maybe it is ‘sign’ that Sxip will work with infocards – they just did an STS exchange to issue us all hotel room keys. – this is of course an allusion to the presentation that Andre of Ping did at Digital Identity World last year where he went through the whole process of checking into the hotel and doing STS’s in analogue space.
Passel: identity. remixed.
DizzyD presented on Passel and The Identity Gang is in the HOUSE! Johanes, Doc, Phil, Mary and Mary – wow three identity women.
He also didn’t really approach it right he didn’t get all the different systems and how they worked and we were all in the audience correcting him. It really highlighted the need for the workshop we are hosting in October.
Here is the summary:
How do I as user my identity on the web?
The ‘story that started it all’
Wife’s machine got Trojan. I had to change all passwords everywhere.
What is Identity?!
Identity is just another class of information we manage.
It’s a second-order problem. When I get on the net I get on it to do Identity Management other tasks.
What is Identity [Italicized] ?
Depends on the setting
Bottom line two fundamental types
third party vouch for and self asserted
His summary of the other stuff..
What are the options:
Passport
All others are not inherently evil.
everyone is throwing protocols against the wall and seeing which ones stick.
who do you trust to host you identity?
SAML
SAML/Liberty
trust relatinoship between two entities on your behalf
“asserting” used a lot in this world….and I will use it a lot
Standards are well documented and widely deployed. Lots of infrastructure required for trust relationships. Conditionals and trust relationships not viable from an open source stand point. Took a lot of time for a second order problem.
SXIP
Identity is locked into who the identity provider. You can change home sites. not locked in. Run on own machine. Powerful for users with centralized for user to move.
LID
Send information back and forth and urls based.
OpenID
No dynamic scripting needed. You have your identity URL tell via meta tag where identity server is. enter URL – blog URL. LiveJournal do you allow it to authenticate?
Can’t i-names do this?
He asserted wrongly that there was not reputation (global services launch will embed reputation in the messaging/contact system.
For Internet-scale Identity needs
- Aggregate IDentity
- Decentralized and open
- Divers programming Language/environments
- Interoperable implementations
- Bootstrap off existing trust models
PASSEL
Gives you more control over data
Aggregates your identity via user-centric three-piece architechure
implemntations already started Perl, PHP, Java and C#
Pluggable trust models.
Generalized model for proving any DNS-based identifier
Trust Model
- how you prove the signer
- person x
- Moving identity information proving that a
- protocol how move around
- plug in how you trust information
PIECES:
Agent (principle’s computer)
- aggregates into portfolio
- public private key and fingerprint
- natively if not
- Zip file on key – use on different locations
Signer (site that makes assertions)
- signer issues token with for example 4 hour life span
- agent must retrieve new token from dizzyd.com
Target (relying party)
- how does the
- retrieval of public key.
Announcing the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW2005)
There’s been considerable conversation around identity on the Internet, or what some would call grassroots identity. Providing identity services between people, websites, and organizations that may or may not have any kind of formalized relationship is a different problem than providing authentication and authorization services within a single organization. Many have argued that the lack of a credible identity infrastructure will eventually result in the Internet being so overrun with fraud as to make it useless for many interesting uses.
To solve this problem, or pieces of it, companies and individuals have made a variety of architectural and governance proposals. Some of these include:
- The Liberty Alliance
- Microsoft’sInfoCardsystem
- Identity Commons
- SXIP
- OpenID
- LID
- XRI/XDI(i-names)
- Passel
Myself, Phil Windley, Drummond Reed, and Doc Searls are hosting the Internet Identity Workshop in Berkeley on October 25 and 26th to provide a forum to disucss these and other architectural and governance proposals for Internet-wide identity services and their underlying philosophies. The workshop will comprise a day of presentations on Internet-scale identity architectures followed by a day of structured open space to accommodate the range of topics and issues that will emerge from day one and other issues and identity services that do not fit into the scope of the formal presentations. We’re hoping that adding a little more formality to the conversation will aid in digesting some of the various proposals.
We’re inviting presentations for the first day on the following topics:
- Problems, issues, politics, and economics or Internet-scale identity systems.
- Architectures for Internet-scale identity systems
- Philosophies that drive architectural decisions in these systems (see Kim Cameron’s Laws of Identity for an example of such a philosophy
If you’d like to present on some other topic, drop one of us a line first and we’ll see how it fits in. Prospective presenters will be asked to submit a 250-300 word abstract. We hope to accomodate everyone, but we may end up picking from the abstracts.
I’m excited about this and looking forward to it. I hope we can have a good set of presentations the first day and a solid day of discussion the second. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, I hope to see you there. Please read the full announcement for some other details and register if you’re coming. There is a $75 charge to cover the cost of the venue, administrative expenses, and the cost of snacks and lunch both dats.
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.
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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.