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
