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Digital Identity

Defining Self-Sovereign Identity: Coding Over Cocktails Podcast

Kaliya Young · May 8, 2021 ·

Are you in charge of your own digital identity? How do you share “verifiable” information about yourself on the internet?

Defining Self-Sovereign Identity with Kaliya Young: Coding Over Cocktails Podcast

I had the opportunity to discuss digital identity with Kevin Montalbo and David Brown, two co-hosts of the Coding Over Cocktails Podcast. The topics we covered were: the different domains of identity, how our identities are currently held and managed by corporations, civil society, and governments, and why we should advocate for the rights of our digital selves.

You can listen to the entire podcast and read the transcript of the show by clicking on the link below!

https://www.torocloud.com/podcast/digital-identities-kaliya-young

Also, you can watch the short “preview” of the show on YouTube.

Presentation: At the STOA

Kaliya Young · October 12, 2020 ·

Earlier this month I got to present at the STOA a forum with an amazing list of presenters and topics happening every day. Enjoy.

Panel at RxC: Digital Identity: A look Ahead

Kaliya Young · August 3, 2020 ·

I almost went to Brazil this year for the Radical Exchange conference. Instead it went virtual with 48 hours of programming. I had the pleasure of talking with Paula Berman (Democracy Earth) and Supriyo Roy (Idena). Each of us shared about different future looking identity projects/efforts we are involved in.

My Talk at New America on Self-Sovereign Identity & the Domains of Identity

Kaliya Young · November 9, 2018 ·

The Future of Property Rights a program at New America just published a new report The Nail Finds a Hammer: Self-Sovereign Identity, Design Principles and Property Rights in the Developing World. I commented extensively on the paper before publication and they included the Domains of Identity within the report. It turns out that many of the Domains of Identity include registries. This whole perspective that registries as the root of many of our systems is very eye opening. Just like when one finds identity one sees it everywhere, it turns our registries are everywhere too.
Mike invited some key contributors to the paper to talk at New America. I presented about both Self-Sovereign Identity AND the domains of Identity … enjoy!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8bZ4GYFwKY

Blockchain vs. CryptoCurrency: BridgeSF Talk

Kaliya Young · May 23, 2018 ·

I was asked to substitute in at the last minuet to talk about the difference between blockchain and cryptocurrency at the BridgeSF conference on their Enterprise Day.
Here are links to what I cover in the talk:
Do You Need a Blockchain. This slide is from DHS S&T and Anil John  who is leading research int his area for that agency.

Supply Chain

  • BeefChain.io
  • BlockPharma
  • Blockchain Transportation Alliance 

Immutable Data

  • Chainpoint by Tierion

Identity on the Blockchain 

  • Verifiable Organizations Network, Led by the British Columbia Government on GitHub. Built on the Hyperleder  Indy Code also on GitHub.
  • Verifiable Credentials Work at the W3C.
  • Decentralized Identifier Work at the W3C building on work from the Internet Identity Workshop and Rebooting the Web  of Trust.
  • The Decentralized Identity  Foundation
  • MyCUID My Credit Union Identity

Slide from Anil John DHS S&T explaining Verified Claims.

The Known Traveller : Unlocking the potential of digital identity for secure seamless travel. World Economic Forum Report.
Crossing the boarder involves many parties. The United States and Canadian Government are collaborating in exploring how to improving boarder crossing and customs clearance. 
Coordination across many parties. 

  • Amply project in South Africa in collaboration with the IXO Foundation and the Company Consent.Global
  • HIE [Health Information Exchange] of One 

Blockchain and Land Rights – work by Mike Graglia at New America Foundation

  • Paper: Blockchain and Property in 2018: At the End of the Beginning
  • Preso: Blockchain and Property in 2018: At the End of the Beginning

Joining the Community to engage further.

  • Come to the Internet Identity Workshop – next is October 23-25, 2018 in MountainView and then again in early May 2019
  • Decentralized Identity Foundation
  • Sovrin Foundation
  • Verse One 

Conclusion:

  • You can reach met Kaliya (at) identitywoman.net
  • If you want to get the Scoop on Self-Sovereign Identity you can get that here!
  • If you want to learn about the work  HumanFirst.Tech

 
Here are the Slides:

My Identiverse: The Evolution of Digital Identity and Openness, Plenary Digital Identity and Embodied Practice

Kaliya Young · April 20, 2018 ·

I was asked to give this talk at the What is Universe? at the University of Oregon, (on their Portland Campus). I cover the history of the Internet Identity Workshop and talk about its core nature as a torus / bowl a feminine form and how this has resulted in the innovation of Self-Sovereign Identity.

My Identiverse: The Evolution of Digital Identity and Openness from Kaliya "Identity Woman" Young

What is an Identifier?

Kaliya Young · January 4, 2018 ·

Tim Bouma wrote a post about Trusted Digital Identity.
In it he unpacks several terms including this one

Identifier: Anything (name, numbers, symbols, etc.) that uniquely distinguishes a member of a population from another member.

Part of  Tim’s definition resonates with a conversation I had with Jean Russel in 2009 that I thought I would share that to support a very nuanced and specific conversation about what identifier actually are and how they work in the physical world and digital world. This complements the  Identifiers: A Field Guide post.
Identifiers
Kaliya  and Jean Russell share a dialogue, learning from each other about reputations and currency. (I write in third person because I want to attribute appropriately to each, and yet this is done together). We have a sense of the overall map of ideas, and we want to start with some core concepts that the work depends upon.
We begin with identifiers. We discuss below what identifiers are and how they work in meat-space. Our next post covers identifiers in the digital context.
Jean: SO….What is an identifier?
Kaliya: An identifier is a pointer to a person or an object
Jean: A pointer to a person or an object?
Kaliya: There are generic identifiers – rose, cup, chair…
Jean: So a word can be an identifier?

Kaliya: Yes. To have a more specific identifier “the green chair over in the corner” identifies it (the specific green chair) …relative to others in the same context – a room, for example.
Jean: Okay, I think I get what you mean by pointer. An identifier allows you to identify something to someone else in a shared context.
Kaliya: Yes. So people’s names identify them in our shared social spaces. They are identifiers too.
Jean: So in meat-space we are using identifiers all the time when we use language together.
Kaliya: However, I am not my name, I have a name – it points to me. You have a name – it points to you.
Jean: Okay, so the name and what it refers to are not the same thing. One is pointing at the other. And there are different kinds of identifiers, then? Like chair is vague and green chair in the corner is specific and my name is specific to me, pretty much.
Kaliya: Chair is a generic identifier, yes. Well, it is specific to you in a social context. Green chair in the corner is more specific. I might want to identify a very particular green chair. I would look on the chair to find the manufacture serial number for it, or I might want it in my company/personal inventory and “assign” it a number identifier for that specific chair.
Jean: Right, so there are degrees of specificity in identifiers.
Kaliya: So people’s name are specific in a social context. They might be more or less “specific” because there is more than one person named Jean in the world and even with my name there is more then one Kaliya. But in my social world – the people I know – I am the only Kaliya. I know several Mary’s though so I have to get more specific when talking about them using a last initial or a last name.
Jean: Okay, so there is an element of uniqueness that is important in an identifier? To successfully identify the object, the identifier needs to be unique?
Kaliya: Yes, unique within the context.
Jean: So we seem to navigate this pretty well in our everyday lives, and we ask for more specificity when we need it.
Kaliya: Yes.
Identifiers in a Digital Context
Jean: Can you explain what identifiers mean in the digital environment?
Kaliya: So, when I am at a dinner party with two Mary’s and having a conversation you signal who you are talking to/about via gestures and stuff – you layer in more info about who you are talking about. Or you might, in a conversation in digital chat, say “Mary R” or “Mary H” because you don’t have bodies and social gestures to layer in. So when we go into digital realm – on the internet, what is the context we are in. So when someone goes to a website and gets an account, they get a username.
Jean: Right, I do that all the time. What does that mean?
Kaliya: The site – often checks to see if anyone else has that username, if they do…you can’t have it because someone else has “that” identifier already.
Jean: So I might be able to get ‘Jean Russell’ on one site but not on another, for example?
Kaliya: Well likely you wouldn’t have a space in your username, so ‘JeanRussell’ or ‘Jean_Russell’
Jean: Ok, so no space, so the code can read it, but I might get ‘JeanRussell’ on one space but not on another, on that next space I get ‘JeanRussell6′
Kaliya: In a way, identifiers for people are like digital bodies, but they were weird cause they wouldn’t let you bring a “body” from another site/context into their site/context.
Jean: Every site you went to – every new site – they would make you get a new “body” a new identifier for that site. Ah… I don’t want to keep track of all those bodies. This is so annoying. I am one person. I want my name to be the same regardless of what site I am on.
Kaliya: Well yes – exactly, so the question is how do you have a unique identifier, that “works” for you across the whole internet. This is what OpenID does. It creates a way for you prove you “own” or “have control of” (as in knowing the password for an account). You need to be Unique within a bigger context then just that website, so the large sites allow users to take the identifier within their space and use it other places. So you can use your Yahoo! ID or MySpace ID and log into other websites. OR you could go and buy a domain name just for you – and use it. So I own http://www.kaliya.net and it is set up so that I can use it as my open ID.
Jean: Well that seems to make it easier. But I still don’t get how it is working compared to the JeanRussell who already signed into this site I am trying to get into
Kaliya: You are just JeanRussell within that context – that website. Identifiers in the digital world, to be effective – need to be unique globally. URLs are all Unique. There is a name space….and domain names – are unique, a global registry, makes sure that no two people/companies/organizations own the same domain name.

Digital Bodies and User-Centric Identity
Jean: Kaliya, we left off our last chat talking about digital bodies and the importance of context with identifiers. Can you say more about digital bodies?
Kaliya: Well lets start with physical bodies – we have just one of these. So when we walk around in physical space people recognize us because we are in the same body we were last time. We only get one and over time is ages but basically it doesn’t fundamentally change and we can’t “get another one.” Last time we talked about identifiers and having the ability to have a globally unique one that you could take with you around the web. This gives you a freedom to move between websites and take your “digital body” with you. The difference is that in digital space you could make yourself several different “digital bodies or identifiers” that were globally unique that you would use in different contexts.
Jean: I am already a second body by creating the first digital body, right? Since it isn’t my physical body?
Kaliya:   🙂
Jean: So having many bodies is even more to keep track of and create?
Kaliya: The digital identifier you create that points at you – is like another digital body. Maybe you want to just be http://www.jeanrussell.com everywhere on the web. Maybe you want to have a professional life “identifier” and a personal life “identifier” that separates those two aspects.
Jean: You mean I can manage those bodies instead of having each platform define them for me?
Kaliya: Yes. An example that was brought up yesterday here at Super Nova by danah boyd was that of a teacher. That a teacher is working in front of children – they can’t be seen to be sexual (having a normal dating life) or drinking alcohol (as a normal social adult). So this is an example where someone in that profession would create an identifier they use to connect to their students on social networks and comment on blogs etc.
Jean: Right. That makes sense. Even in my physical body in the analog world, I am showing different facets of myself in different contexts.
Kaliya: They need to have a different identifier they use for their social connections to other adults – in their dating/social life. That same teacher might be politically active – as they have a right as a private citizen to be and those political views well within the spectrum of points of view that are acceptable might not be “the same” as those in their particular town or neighborhood – say a strong environmentalist in a very coal producing town. So they want to take action and voice opinions and share with others who are other active citizens. They would need a different digital identifier for that.
Jean: So, it feels like an advantage to have the ability to manage these digital bodies based on the context they show up in? And thus the community they mesh with in that context?
Kaliya: Back to our first conversation it would be great if they didn’t have to get a new identifier each time they went to a different environmental site – a portable one for them within that context of environmental activists. Yes, contextual management is important. The tools to support individuals doing this are just beginning to be conceptualized and developed.
Jean: So what I hear you saying Kaliya, is that we need our digital bodies to be a reflection of the facets of ourselves and the intersection of those facets with the communities we participate in. This is not defined by platform as much as it is our practices online.
Kaliya: Yes – an we need open standards that give us the freedom to move around the web with identifiers (digital bodies) from one website to another. This has to do with the underlying architecture of the social web that platforms build on. How we use these platforms and tools is complex. To have good practices, we need development of “web” (which had internet below it) and then on top of that is a layer where identifiers are – and applications that use them. then there is an emerging set of standards to move information we generate in social contexts around between sites these are called activity streams. So a website is a context, a group within a site is a context too. Each google group you are in is different – its own cluster of people.
Jean: Right, although there might be some overlaps, that can’t be assumed that I want to show the same facet of myself to all of my google groups.
Kaliya: There are sort of meta contexts – so a network of environmental activist sites would be an example of that.
Jean: Right, a site like Zanby does that for One Sky. Or Ning, or is that more of a tech context and not a purpose context. [Kaliya: and neither uses OpenID]
Kaliya: I guess you can think of it as topic contexts and platform contexts. One of the issues is that most platform contexts do not support being able to switch between different login/handles/identifiers very easily at all. You might have a personal yahoo account and a professional one, on ning too, same deal.
Jean: Right, like on twitter, I was working around that by using api clients or using different browsers!
Kaliya: Right, or logging in and logging out. Mozilla is working on a project to help people manage their ID’s within the browser. The platforms would like us all to “just have one identity” and not switch between but this is not realistic.
Jean: Right, getting back to that teacher example – she may want to be in touch with students on facebook… and want to keep her personal life in a different name there. So we have a social practice for doing that, but the tools don’t yet adequately reflect that.

Talk at TEDx Brussels

Kaliya Young · October 19, 2016 ·

I was invited to give a talk at TEDx Brussels.
I explain Identity in the context of the Future. Enjoy!

Rethinking Personal Data: 3 WEF reports

Kaliya Young · October 19, 2016 ·

I met Marc Davis at SXSW in 2010, we instantly clicked and began working together. He was on contract to develop pre-reading material for a WEF meeting in the fall about Personal Data. I contributed significantly to the document which became the basis of the first Rethinking Personal Data project Report, Personal Data the Emergence of a New Asset Class. [click on the image to download the report].
wef1
 
I remained actively engaged in the project and two of the Appendixes in the 2nd report were authored by me.  The MindMap of Personal Data Types and the Value Network Analysis of the Exploitive Personal Data Ecosystem (Both of these are in the My Data, My Value, 6 Sense Making Diagrams) [Click on the image to download the report PDF]
wef2
 
Diagrams that appeared in the third report I helped sketch out with Bill Hoffman. Here is the Third WEF report PDF [click on the document image].
wef3
WEF Report #3 write up on my Blog.
 

WEF Report #3: Unlocking the Value of Personal Data!

Identity 101, Boot Camp for Identity North 2016

Kaliya Young · October 18, 2016 ·

This June I was invited to present the Identity 101 BootCamp ahead of the Identity North Conference in Toronto. People arrived 90 min early at 8am for this presentation.
I walk through some of the core vocabulary for identity (authentication, authorization, enrollment, verification and contextualize the different contexts (Enterprise, Government and User-Centric)  and power structures that operates within. We also include the Identity Spectrum between verified and anonymous ID there is a whole range and some combinations) The presentation ends sharing Kim Cameron’s Laws of Identity and the Properties of Identity.

Identity 101: Boot Camp for Identity North 2016 from Kaliya "Identity Woman" Young

Identity and Social Justice

Kaliya Young · October 18, 2016 ·

I co-presented Identification and Social Justice with Bob Blakley who is the Global Director, Information Security Innovation at Citi as the closing keynote at the Cloud Identity Summit in Colorado.
I gave this presentation in 2012 at the Cloud Identity Summit as the Closing Keynote address. It highlights issues that surround the rich having privilege and able to manage their identities more favorably then the poor.
 

Identification and social justice from Kaliya “Identity Woman” Young

BC Identity Citizen Consultation Results!!!!

Kaliya Young · August 17, 2014 · Leave a Comment

This article explains more about the different parts of the British Columbia Citizen Consultation about their “identity card’ along with how it is relevant and can inform the NSTIC effort. [Read more…] about BC Identity Citizen Consultation Results!!!!

HOPE X: Updates from the Online Identity Battlefield

Kaliya Young · July 21, 2014 ·

I gave this talk on July 20, 2014.

Hope x talk from Kaliya "Identity Woman" Young

Core Concepts in Identity

Kaliya Young · July 31, 2013 · 1 Comment

One of the reasons that digital identity can be such a challenging topic to address is that we all swim in the sea of identity every day.  We don’t think about what is really going in the transactions….and many different aspects of a transaction can all seem do be one thing.  The early Identity Gang conversations focused a lot on figuring out what some core words meant and developed first shared understanding and then shared language to talk about these concepts in the community.
I’m writing this post now for a few reasons.
There is finally a conversation about taxonomy with the IDESG – (Yes! after over a year of being in existence it is finally happening (I recommended in my NSTIC NOI Response  that it be one of the first things focused on)
Secondly I have been giving a 1/2 day and 1 day seminar about identity and personal data for several years now (You can hire me!).  Recently I gave this seminar in New Zealand to top enterprise and government leaders working on identity projects 3 times in one week.  We covered:

  • The Persona and Context in Life
  • The Spectrum of Identity
  • What is Trust?
  • A Field Guide to Internet Trust
  • What is Personal Data
  • Market Models for Personal Data
  • Government Initiatives Globally in eID & Personal Data

[Read more…] about Core Concepts in Identity

Meta-Governance

Kaliya Young · July 9, 2013 · Leave a Comment

This spring I attended the Executive Education program Leadership and Public Policy in the 21st century at the Harvard Kennedy school of government with fellow Young Global Leaders (part of the World Economic Forum).  A line of future inquiry that came to me by the end of that two weeks –
How do we design, create, get functioning and evolve governance systems?
The governance of governance systems = Meta-Goverancne. 
At the Kennedy program all they could talk about was “individual leadership” (with good advice from good teams of course) at the top of  Organizations.  They all waved their hands and said “Good luck young leaders, We know its more complicated now…and the problems are bigger then just organizational size but we don’t really know how what to tell you about how to interorgainzational collaborative problem solving and innovations…so “good luck”.
It was surreal because this inter-organizational, complex space is where I spend my work life helping design and facilitate unconferneces – it is in that complex inter organizational place.
I have this clear vision about how to bring my two main career bodies of knowledge together (digital identity + digital systems & design and facilitation of unconferneces using a range of participatory methods) along with a range of other fields/disciplines that I have tracked in the last 10 years.

Real Names vs Nyms at Quora & Unconferences

Kaliya Young · July 30, 2012 · 1 Comment

I am again in a #nymwar [wikipedia & Botgirl’s Scoop.it] situation that I actually care about. I have been denied full participation in Quora for a long long time now because my last name was listed as IdentityWoman (ironically my answer to why having control over your identity and personal data online matters did go through but then was put into suspension when they insisted on changing my name to a WASPonym).
Now there is a thread all about an unconfernece for women of Quora and they have mentioned both Unconference.net my business and She’s Geeky that I founded in the threads. I for this one important conversation bow to the “feudal lord”  of Quora as their humble “content producing servent” share my so-called real name…and help them have a good unconference and raise the issues of real name requirements within the context of real human beings who engage with the site all the time and hopefully staff as well.  Until we have the freedom to choose our names for public interactions on the web – to define our own identities based on our context and how we wish to appear where – we do not live in a free society.
 
Before they “banned” me for having the wrong color skin name. I got to write an eloquent to this question (posted below since it isn’t on their site).
Why does owning one’s own online identity and personal data matter?
and was voted to the top (with 5 votes) by others…but now that answer isn’t there cause I didn’t use my real name.
So now you can’t see it…this is akin to not letting me sit somewhere in a public space because the color of my skin is the wrong one OR I happen to sit in a wheel chair to get around and there isn’t room in our restaurant and they are in violation of American’s with Disabilities Act.
The women of Quora are talking about organizing an unconfernece and found two of my organizations/sites and are enthusiastic about them. I am totally unable to talk to them about their ideas or my sites unless I pass their “real names” test….you know like a pole tax … that Bob and I talked about in our Cloud Identity Summit closing Keynote about Identification and Social Justice (slides and videos will be online soon).
My answer to:
Why does owning one’s own online identity and personal data matter?

We own our own bodies – we have freedom and autonomy to move around the physical world.  We have rights and freedoms; If our physical lives are terminated there are consequences.
In the digital world many people are not the primary “owner” of their own identity (in digital space the equivalent of a physical body is a persistent identifier like an e-mail address or a URL or phone number).  Most people’s identity on the web is “under” terms and conditions of a private company and they can terminate people’s accounts, their identities, without recourse.
Many companies with which people have their identities “under” choose to in exchange for providing identity provisioning services and things like e-mail. They also track and aggregate user’s activities on their services and across the web via cookies and other beacons.  This profile of activity has real value and is being used by the companies to profile them and then sell abstract versions of the profile information on ad exchanges.
Some have said we live in an age of digital feudalism, where we are serfs on the lords’ manors (the large web portals).
Having the freedom and autonomy to choose who we are online and how we express ourselves is important to ensuring a free society  with rights and liberty.
Adding some more: About one’s social graph… The links in your social graph in the current architecture of the web exist within particular contexts – you have friends in Facebook or Followers on Twitter or Professional Contacts on LinkedIN. Those links, those connections in a “social graph” are ulitmately owned by the company within which you made those links. If you choose to leave any one of those networks – all your links to those people are terminated.
This is an architecture of control. You are locked into those systems if you don’t want to loose the links to others in them. To own your own identity would be to have an identity that would give you the freedom to not loose the links to your contacts, they would be peer to peer autonomous of any particular service.
The next time there is a major social revolution like in Egypt governments are not going to try and turn of the internet or mobile phone system it is likely they will simply call facebook ans ask them to terminate the accounts of dissidents.

 
 

Recent Activity Pt 4: Europe Week 1

Kaliya Young · November 27, 2011 · Leave a Comment

Week one in Europe was busy. The day I arrived Esther picked me up and we headed to Qiy’s offices where i got to run into John Harrison who I last saw a year ago at IIW Europe. He is organizing a consortium to go in for FP-7 money (80 million) put out for projects around Identity in the European Union.
Wednesday was Nov 9th Identity.Next convened by Robert was great bringing people together from across Europe. 1/2 the day was a regular conference and 1/2 the day was an UnConference that I helped facilitate.  I ran a session about personal data and we had a good conversation.  I also learned about a German effort that seemed promising – Pidder – their preso in The Hague
November 10th I headed to London for New Digital Economics EMEA along with Maarten from Qiy.  It was fantastic to be on stage with 5 different start-up projects all doing Personal Data along with one big one 🙂

  • William Heath, Founder & Chairman, Mydex
  • John Harrison, Personal Information Brokerage
  • Marcel Van Galen, CEO/Founder, QIY
  • Luk Vervenne, CEO, Synergetics
  • Herve Le Jouan, CEO, Privowny
  • Richard Benjamins, Director of User Modeling, Telefonica Digital

It was clear that the energy in the whole space had shifted beyond the theoretical and the response from the audience was positive.  I shared the landscape map we have been working on to explain elements of the overall ecosystem.
Digital Death Day was November 11th in Amsterdam was small but really good with myself, Stacie and Tamara organizing.  We had a small group that included a Funeral Director a whole group form Ziggur. We were sponsored by the company formerly know as DataInherit – they changed their name to SecureSafe. Given that Amsterdam is closer then California to Switzerland we were hopping they would make it given their ongoing support…alas not this year.
One of the key things to come out of the event was an effort to unite the technology companies working on solutions in this area around work to put forward the idea of a special OAuth token for their kind of services perhaps also with a “Trust Framework” that could use the OIX infrastructure.
It as also inspiring to have  two two young developers attend.

  • Leif Ekas  travelled from Norway – I had met him this summer in Boston when he was attending summer school at BU and working on his startup around aspects of digital death.
  • Sebastian Hagens – Sebastix
It made me wish Markus had made it there from Vienna.
When I was at TEDx Brussels I was approached by another young developer Tim De Conick well more accurately visionary who got some amazing code written – WriteID.
Given the energy last summer at the Federated Social Web Summit and these new efforts that could all be connected together/interoperable. I think there is critical mass for a developer / hacker week for Personal Data in Europe this Spring Summer and I am keen to help organize it.

The Nymwars and what they mean: summary of my posts to date.

Kaliya Young · November 17, 2011 · 4 Comments

Update: Google relented a bit, however I am still waiting to see if my name of choice was approved. You can read about the process I had to go through here. The New Google Names Process
—————–
For those of you coming from the Mercury News story on the NymWars exploding…
I STILL have my Google+ profile suspended for using a  [  .  ] as my last name.  Prior to that I had “Identity Woman” as my last name and prior to that… before I ever got a G+ profile and since I started using Gmail and Google Profiles I had a   [  *   ]as my last name. [see the complete list of posts about this whole saga below]
It is my right to choose my own name online and how I express it.  Names and identities are socially constructed AND contextual… and without the freedom to choose our own names, and the freedom to have different names (and identifiers) across different contexts we will end up with a social reality that I don’t want to live in: Participatory Totalitarianism.
[Read more…] about The Nymwars and what they mean: summary of my posts to date.

Web Wide Sentence Level Annotation -> Hypothes.is

Kaliya Young · October 15, 2011 · Leave a Comment

I first met Dan Whaley last spring via an introduction from Jim Fournier co-founder of Planetwork.  I was inspired by the vision he was working on building Hypothes.is –  a way to have sentence level annotation of news and other articles on a web wide scale. Really a foundation for peer review on the web. The motivation for his work is to support greater discernment of the truth around climate change and other key issues facing our society and our planet.  (Another area I could see this being really useful right now is around accountability in the financial system and ways to make that real.)
He asked me to be a part of the project as an advisor particularly around identity issues and technology options for identity.  He is taking my advice and coming to IIW this coming week.  Its an honor to be amongst other distinguished advisors like Brewster Kahle,  John Perry Barlow,  Mark Surman and others..

He has been working on a development plan and has a solid on one in place.  He has launched a Kickstarter Campaign and  stars in the video that articulates the vision of the project.  If you are inspired by the vision I encourage you to contribute.

Is Google+ is being lynched by out-spoken users upset by real names policy?

Kaliya Young · August 28, 2011 · 5 Comments

Following my post yesterday Google+ says your name is “Toby” not “Kunta Kinte”, I chronicled tweets from this morning’s back and forth with  Tim O’Reilly and Kevin Marks, Nishant  Kaushik, Phil Hunt,  Steve Bogart and Suw Charman-Anderson.
I wrote the original post after watching the Bradley Horwitz (@elatable) – Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) interview re: Google+. I found Tim’s choice of words about the tone (strident) and judgement (self-righteous) towards those standing up for their freedom to choose their own names on the new social network being rolled out by Google internet’s predominant search engine disappointing.  His response to my post was to call me self-righteous and reiterate that this was just a market issue.
I myself have been the victim of a Google+ suspension since July 31st and yesterday I applied for a mononym profile (which is what it was before they insisted I fill out my last name which I chose to do so with my online handle and real life identity “Identity Woman”) 
In the thread this morning Tim said that the kind of pressure being aimed at Google is way worse then anything they are doing and that in fact Google was the subject of a “lynch mob” by these same people.  Sigh, I guess Tim hasn’t read much history but I have included some quotes form and links to wikipedia for additional historial context.
Update: inspired in part by this post an amazing post “about tone” as a silencing/ignoring tactics when difficult, uncomfortable challenges are raised in situations of privilege was written by Shiela Marie.  
I think there is a need for greater understanding all around and that perhaps blogging and tweeting isn’t really the best way to address it.  I know that in the identity community when we first formed once we started meeting one another in person and really having deep dialogues in analogue form that deeper understanding emerged.  IIW the place we have been gathering for 6 years and talking about the identity issues of the internet and other digital systems is coming up in mid-October and all are welcome.  The agenda is created live the day of the event and all topics are welcome.
Here’s the thread… (oldest tweets first)
 Note all the images of tweets in this thread are linked to the actual tweet (unless they erased the tweet).  [Read more…] about Is Google+ is being lynched by out-spoken users upset by real names policy?

Google+ says your name is "Toby" NOT "Kunta Kinte"

Kaliya Young · August 27, 2011 · 21 Comments

This post is about what is going on at a deeper level when Google+ says your name is “Toby” NOT “Kunta Kinte”. The punchline video is at the bottom feel free to scroll there and watch if you don’t want to read to much.

This whole line of thought to explain to those who don’t get what is going on with Google+ names policy arose yesterday after I watched the Bradley Horwitz – Tim O’Reilly interview (they start talking about the real names issue at about minute 24).

[Read more…] about Google+ says your name is "Toby" NOT "Kunta Kinte"

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