Identity Woman

Independent Advocate for the Rights and Dignity of our Digital Selves

Digital Identity

Leafar's map of Virtual Identity Universe

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Leafar pinged me this we to point me over to his map of the Virtual Identity 0.2 = Personal Universe = my (omega)
It is a neat little graph with two axes Private <–> Public and Main Activities <–> Entertainment.
In the Private Main Activities is Real Virtual Life ‘What I virtually do’.
Moving across the top there is Personal “who I like.”
In Public Main Activities is Hobbies ‘What I deeply share.”
Moving down there is Knowledge “what I know.”
In Public Entertainment is Professional “What I really do.” (mm…not sure about this designation)
Moving across to the other corner is Reputation “Who I know.”
In Entertainment Public is Show “What I quickly share.”
Moving up that side is Tastes What I like.
we are back at the first corner In the Private Main Activities is Real Virtual Life ‘What I virtually do’.
In the middle is I Am “what I say”
The interesting thing about the tiles is they have many different internet services on them. It actually makes a great case for SSO and profile sharing because there are all these tools and services that I might use in a shared context but that currently don’t support a way for me to move information around at all.

Could have called it Identity 2.0 but I am rather binary and we’re on the way, still nesting our identities.

He encloses a song I groove to regularly with the quote ‘breath and believe’

It’s been two years since we start thinking about U.[lik] and we are know ready to be part of the identity puzzle. With our main extra feature : recommendation with affinity; so it will not be just popularity rulin’ but attention.

Yet Another Conference with a Digital Identity Track

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We have the Forthcoming ACM conference with a special day on November 3 on Digital Identity. I just found this annoucement from the Future of Identity in the Information Society (FIDIS) about a special track at the 22nd IFIP International Information Security Conference. The overall conference theme is new approaches for security, privacy and trust in complex environments. It is May 14-16 in South Africa.
Topics may include:
* Identity management
* Profiling and customer relation management
* Global management of identities
* Advanced identity documents
* RFID and other, tracking technologies
* Biometrics
* Surveillance
* ID related crime
* IT law for preventing Misuse
* Computer Forensics
* Privacy, anonymity and pseudonymity
* Multilateral Security
* Adequacy and Inadequacy of the Law
* Social, legal and ethical aspects of IT security

Planetwork on Identity Thursday 21

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This coming Thursday the 21st Johannes and I will be speaking at the Planetwork Fourm. We are at a new venue…Standford University, Building 460 room 126. Doors at 6 and presentations at 7.
Lauren Gelman will open the evening speaking about Net Neutrality and Eugene will share his work on HyperScope. Here is the link to the event home page.
I will talk about the latest happenings in user-centric Identity and Johannes will continue along that theme diving into more technical details of OpenID and the Open Source Identity Selector.
Eugene will follow up by sharing about his work on the HyperScope project.

Winning The Digital Identity World Award

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So today was a big day. Digital Identity World gave me their yearly award for my work ‘behind the scenes’ work with the Identity Gang and the Internet Identity Workshop. It feels great to be seen in for over two years of hard work.
I really owe a great debt to Jim Fournier and Elizabeth Thompson for founding Planetwork and bringing together an amazing community from which I learned a lot and got me inspired to work in technology. They worked hard to bring the Link Tank together who’s output was at least partially captured i n the Augmented Social Network White Paper. If you are trying to figure out user-centric identity and what it might mean socially this is still a critical document for that.
Owen Davis deserves a lot of thank yous for his personal vision, intellectual contribution and putting up his own money to work on addressing the social issues that arise with a user-centric identity layer by forming Identity Commons. His decision to hire me gave me my first real job in this space where I learned a lot and began building a network of relationships that became at the heart of the current community.
Of course we must thank our family and my husband Brian has been supportive of my crazy travel schedule to serve and evangelize about goings on inside the community.
I really love the community and thank all of you for your support and I must particularly thank Phil Windley and Doc Searls for there partnership with me in producing the Internet Identity Workshop and Identity Open Spaces.
Come to the Workshop in December it will be a great time.

What is your title…mine is Identity Woman

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So I am back from the Art of Leadership at HollyHock that was both a vacation and a bit of work. While I was away the announcement went out about a conference I agreed to speak at about identity in October – Office 2.0.
I didn’t really have time to do a bio while off retreating and I pointed them to my broad “who I am” page at kaliyasblogs. In reading this they picked up on a positional title I had and decided to list me with that just linking to Identity Woman under the blog link (without mentioning it in text). I find this odd because Ismael asked me to speak at the conference because I am Identity Woman.

From IT Redux: Kaliya’s participation should help us understand if there is a chance that we could get single sign-on for Office 2.0 in our lifetimes.

I would like to ask all the folks who blogged about the upcoming conference to list me as “Kaliya Hamlin aka Identity Woman, Network Director Planetwork”.
I find it interesting there is such a focus on that positional title to have legitimacy in this industry. I really think it is a disservice all around there are people who contribute a lot without positional ‘titles’ who deserve to be on stage some times perhaps more then those on stage who have ‘titles’. I hope we as a community can look at this bias towards ‘titles’ and reflect on the unique gifts and talents that are not being recognized because of it.
Think about it. If you can change my title listing on your blogs…thanks 🙂
Criag
Ross
Rob
David
Woodrow

A letter from a user…"I still don't quite get it yet"

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I got a note from this guy like a month ago..saying help! I am about to do a Joomla! (the a fork of to Mambo an open source CMS ) install and we are looking at Identity what do we do? I pointed him towards OpenID and he wrote this back after a few weeks…I think it speaks to the major market communication issues we face.
Dear Ms Hamlin,
The difficult questions always remains how you will cover the ground technically and how it will be socially translated. In the Digital Identity field, it’s just hard to pick an option. There are so many but which one will be or evolve itself in the “swiss-knife” of digital identity. You mention OpenID is gathering steam and seems destined to a promising run.

What I’m still unclear of is:
**How the heavyweights (IBM, Microsoft, Sun, Yahoo, Google & al.) will play along with digital identity and its standardization?
I think you need to differentiate the type of heavyweights there are primarily consumer facing ones – Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, AOL, Amazon, eBay/PayPal/Skype, FoxInteractive (mySpace). Then there are enterprise tool providers – IBM, Sun, Oracle, CA, etc. who are building out primarily for the enterprise.
For the consumer facing companies will they play along? Will they they allow users to sign in using OpenID’s that originate from places other then themselves. Kim has already stated emphatically that Microsoft Spaces Live will allow more then just Windows Live IDs. Will others? I know that many of them have individuals participating on the public mailing list and showing up at conferences. Will choose to adopt supporting users doing SSO beyond there silos – that is a question only they can answer. I think it is worth asking them.
The Enterprise world is a bit different. They have some ‘answers’ to SSO with things like LDAP. There are well accepted standards for authentication like SAML2. Some of them are also very interested in XRI for what it can help with for managing identity in the enterprise and beyond. They don’t need web wide distributed identity as much. I think part of what CardSpace is about is supporting better enterprise implementations of managed cards to support sign-on across systems.
**How all the proposed projects & solutions (OpenID, i-Names, LID, Higgins, Shibboleth, Liberty Alliance + others) will and plan to interoperate? Can it be considered an issue?
So for starters OpenID2 already does OpenID url and i-names ‘interoperability’ in the sense you can use them both in an OpenID2 login box. LID was woven in with this version of the spec too.
At the Identity Open Space that happened immediately following the Liberty Alliance meetings in Vancouver in July one of the main outcomes was an agreement by the OpenID guys to have a dialogue in earnest with the SAML2 guys about how the next version of the spec moved towards convergence between the two. Just so you can orient so this makes sense the SAML2 spec arose because the SAML1 spec didn’t meet all the needs of the enterprise sector so Liberty built on top of that spec and then they incorporated those changes and made SAML2. Shibboleth particular implementation of SAML2 that has been widely adopted in higher education and has some capacity to support authenticated anonymity. (one institution knows that this person ‘is’ from a partner institution but does not know exactly who the person is).
Higgins is a ‘framework’ for developing profile management at this point I think within an enterprise context. It is farther out in its development cycle. and has an aspect that is a card selector simliar to the Microsoft CardSpace that will be coming out with Vista. They are working in a community with IBM and Novell and some others to build an Open Source Identity Selector.
This is where there is a distinction between address based and card based identity. The two are complementary. Drummond has a good post about them.
**In conclusion, I’m curious to know your opinion on the viability of commercial venture in the digital identity such as i-Names when “similar” offering are given for free with OpenID and LID? I might be misinterpreting some concepts here.

All entities offering digital identities right now are doing so for free. You can get a free OpenID or a free i-name. Both are ‘2nd tier’
I can go to Verisign’s pip and get http://eddie.verisignlabs.com and authenticate against that – the thing is that verisign owns the .verisignlabs.com bit and is giving you a space under that. Or you could have a Blog hosted some where like livejournal that you just use the URL from that. (AOL just said it was letting people register domains for free though).
You can get a free i-name doing a similar thing FreeID is offering @freeid*eddie as an option.
In both cases you can go and buy a global level domain or i-name and pay for that. With a URL you have to pay for the domain name but also know enough to get the URL set up to do OpenID authentication.
With the i-names they are designed from the beginning to let you authenticate against them and do other things that people might like to do on the web. So you can get =eddie and also use it to point persistently at your blog or your resume..and even if those resources move around the web..the link via your i-name can stay persistent. You can do this with a URL too…but so far none of the UI’s I have ever used for managing my Domain names are really user friendly or designed to support normal people creating links to persistent resources.
As non programmer-coder, gaining a deep understanding of the digital identity field can be daunting. I deeply appreciate the time you devoted me!
I would like to start a ‘user group’ as part of the identity dialogue of interested non programmers – non-identity geeks like yourself to be a forum to voice your thoughts and opinions and help us get clear about what we are doing. Would you be the first member of such a group? Do others think this is a good idea or want to join?

Identity in the Arab World pt2

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In the San Francisco Cronicle: Paternity trial shocks Egyptians
Court rules against famous actor, siding with mother, child This situation where children are not recognized by the state when no father is present. It is quite concerning to think about the range of social norms that are different in different cultural contexts that really limit peoples freedom to be full citizens. I am sure this is not the only example.

There are an estimated 2 million unregistered children in Egypt, according to Lamya Lotfey, a specialist on paternity law at the New Women Foundation, a Cairo-based feminist organization. Since the ministry of health refuses to issue a birth certificate without the father’s presence or consent, illegitimate children don’t officially exist unless the mother undertakes a legal process that can take as long as six years so the child bears the last name of the maternal grandfather. In the meantime, the child cannot obtain a passport, enroll in school or qualify for state-sponsored vaccinations. As a result, most unmarried women choose abortion or orphanages, according to Lotfey.

A group of nongovernmental organizations is lobbying for the right of all children to have birth certificates, regardless of a recognized father.

Identity in the Arab World pt1

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Two stories that I have read in the print the last two weeks about Identity issues in the Arab world that are worth surfacing.
First of all this story in Newsweek Iraq:A Deadly Name Game

By law, all Iraqis carry jinsiyas, or national ID cards. But in a country where your ethnicity can make you a target, a jinsiya can become a death warrant. If your name is Omar you’re likely a Sunni Muslim, named after a seventh-century imam despised by Shiites. If you’re Amar or Aamer, pronounced almost the same, you could be from either sect. If you’re Ali, you’re probably Shiite. As a result, many Iraqis have started carrying two jinsiyas—a real one, and a fake one linking them to the rival sect. The demand for false ID cards has spiked as bodies pile up in the Baghdad morgue at the rate of 35 to 50 a day, frequently bound and blindfolded, a jinsiya in their shirt pocket.

It seems that we often think of identity in the context of western liberal democracy this situation in Iraq makes me wonder about what it means to make ‘really secure’ documents and identifying papers for people.

Identity Open Space – Sept 11, Santa Clara

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So we have had a fabulous series of open space events since May’s Internet Identity Workshop . The Identity Mashup at Berkman 3rd Day Open Space Post Liberty Alliance Identity Open Space specifically but also as major themes at Mashup Camp that had 5 sessions on identity and at OSCON and OSCamp.
I think one the reason things have been developing rapidly is because of the open opportunities to address critical issues and reflect as a community on next steps. So there is another one coming up before the next Internet Identity Workshop in December.
The Monday of Digital Identity World’s start we are hosting an Identity Open Space at the Santa Clara Convention Center. It will begin at 9am with agenda creation with sessions starting at 9:30 going until 3 when DIDW officially starts.
The cost is $25 just to cover lunch – so we can eat on site. Please sign up here… and add your name to the wiki and post suggested topics you bring to the conversation.
You also get a discount on attending Digital Identity World if you come to the Identity Open Space.
I know it is a bit of a challenge to travel on Sunday but I hope those of you from out of town will choose to do that. Hopefully we can get lost of folks working on new web tools who might be able to actually use – user-centric identity. Besides who wants to get on a plane on September 11th.

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August 10 is for everyone

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Apparently some how the announcement was not clear.
The OpenID Informational Evening is for Developers…of all stripes, open source, free software, “source available”, and closed source.
August 10th, 6-9, 2029 University Avenue (upstairs) Berkeley, CA. Please RSVP to me – kaliya [at] mac (dot) com.
The $5000 per project bounty that was announced at OSCON is for getting OpenID into core distributions of OSI approved licensed open source projects.

i-names in the sphere

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With the launch of i-names about two weeks ago it thought I would review some the coverage because it is interesting how people put all this stuff into there own words.
The most enthusiastic I-names mention in the shpere came from
derpressionisms with the title i love i names and so will you. It is great to see someone get it so deeply so quickly (he just learned about them the week of launch). It is really worth reading if you are trying to understand how it all works. One thing that is off though is the reference to XNS. That became XRI and XDI – two different open OASIS standards. By splitting the identifier stuff (XRI) from the data sharing stuff (XDI) it is more adoptable.

Saunders also picked up on inames calling them Your Portable Identity.

It looks as if the dream of a user controlled, portable identity is about to become a reality. I’ve been swapping email with Kaliya Hamlin about identity standards. She has pointed me to inames.net, a commons for identity. Christine Herron has also recently written about this effort.
What’s an iname? It’s a human friendly handle (mine is =alec.saunders) for a person or organization that you can use to organize all of your identity bits in one place – email addresses, phone numbers, IM handles and so on. Like DNS, you simply pick a registrar, and select a name. Services include single sign-on, contact, forwarding, and a unified address book.
Cool!

Someone also highlighted the idea of Identity Networks being here.

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Identity on Rails

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Last weekend there as the first official Ruby on Rails Conference in Chicago. OpenID, Rails and Identity 2.0: Building and Cultivating an Identity Ecosystem. was presented by Matt Pelletier owner of EastMedia a Ruby development shop in NYC that has done a lot of the coding for the Verisign PIP And Kiran Dandekar is a colleague of David Recordon at Verisign and presented at a different time as well….
Here are some of the best summaries from the blogosphere…
Blogging RailsConf:

Digital identity sucks!
* Repetitive
* Complex and inconsistent
* Poor UI
* Lack of control
* Unnecessary

notkeepingitreal.com:

An Open Identity system should be…
* Extensible
* User managed
* Open
* Perpetual (not just used once)
It’s about you
* The general idea is that when you go to a site, you are redirected back to your site, where you log in. The site that you intended to go to communicates to your site and confirms your identity, allowing you into the site you wanted to go to in the first place. And best of all, once you do login once, you’re on: Single Sign On!
* There are attributes that you control. You can specify the attributes that you want to share with each site.
* Some attributes (such as age, like if you are on a site selling alcoholic beverages) need to be verified. Certain companies would then be in the business of verifying OpenID attributes.

Fingerprints of Casper Fabricius

Kiran Dandekar made an entertaining point out of demonstrating the variety of information that has be made available about him in different contexts like business, community, family or alumni. The problem is, he stated, that identities and identity attributes are site centric on the web, so you have to start from scratch entering this information on every site and even identifying yourself, as opposed to when you – for example – board in the airport, and all the airline need to verify your identity is your driver’s license. The driver’s license is not issued by the airline, but nevertheless is accepted to identify you, because the issuer of the identity is trusted.

Kuniforum:

Matt’s presentation on Sunday morning was on OpenID and is definitely something I intend to track, as the architecture seems really viable. Way smarter than Passport.

BloggingRailsConf:

Project Bantay
* Blend Yadis + OpenID and offer them as a service
* Building an identity 2.0 stack
o Protocol support
o Yadis
o OpenID 1.1
o http://openidenabled.com
o Mongrel
o A natural fit for HTTP-heavy protocols
o Tight, fast, secure
o Support for Handlers, Filters
o Zed Shaw is the man
o Identity server
o Single sign on
o Profile management
o Trust requests
o Consumer plugin
o Rails plugin
o Push-button simplicity
o Leverage Rails conventions
o Play nice with “old” idiom of user silo
o Bookmarks demo application
o Testing
o Interesting test environment
o Test libraries
o Test handlers
o Test Rails app
o Test cross-site functionality (Selenium)
o Mongrel Rules!
An identity ecosystem
* Cultivating Services
o Claims verification
o Dating sites: verify your gender
o pr0n: verfiy your age
o Job application: verify your green card
o No posting to kids’ blogs unless you’re <= 14
o Reputation
o Seller reputation
o Weenie reputation
o You can’t post blog comments
o No committing to Rails trunk unless you’re a verified pouty artsy wanker
o Trusting identity providers
+ Needs to be discussed
+ Trust chain
o Wide open marketplace
o Develop creative new services
Next steps
* Download the plugin – identity.eastmedia.com
* Download the bookmarks demo app
* Identity Server to be released this summer
* Play around. Use your noodle.

Emerging Identity Standards

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I am deeply conflicted – Standards for users is happening at BloggerCon the same tim as Who Owns You at SuperNova.
So for both “”panels”” I though I would share that this week there were three major developments within the identity sector towards convergence around standards.
i-names global services launched
OpenID 2.0 clarified
and OSIS was formed A Giant Step to Reduce Uncertainty in the Digital Identity Marketplace

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Identity Gang now a group in Second Life

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So today we had someone from Second LIfe talk on the reputation at the identity mashup. I decided to go to SL and start an Identity Gang there so we can have ‘in world meetings’. To join just go to Second Life and search in groups for Identity Gang and join! We need more then three members in three days to stay alive as a group.
Hopefully we can use it to augment the back channel at conferences like this when we are all listening to panels.

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Identity at Organizers Collaborative & A Model for Nonprofit Tech

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I had a good time yesterday at the Organizers Collaborative Conference. I presented about the coming identity layer – sharing at a high level i-brokers, profile management and how people might manage their relationships with multiple civil society organizations. Two of my peers Jo Lee and Rob Stuart – long time participants in the nonprofit technology world were there specifically to see the latest developments and were impressed.
Earlier in the morning I stopped into Alissa Fencsik’s presentation on Technology Decision-Making for the Non-Technical Executive. She presented a good high level framework to help think about tech decisions.
At a basic level there is Infrastructure – it is like electricity you just turn it on and it works – all your staff have their own computers, they have e-mail accounts, you are doing regular backups etc.. With this layer in place it creates a foundation that prevents problems, minimizes damage if a problem arise and eliminates inefficiency.
Next is Automation with the goal of achieving business objectives more efficiently providing time savings, more information, addresses issues proactively not reactively and supports more effective and targeted marketing.
Innovative uses of technology are those that create social change by leveraging the new communication possible via the web and other information and communication technology (like text messaging). This might include new programs to address a community need or new tools that transform the ability to execute on mission.

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Identity as a Commons, like, air, water or energy

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On the serious side of his talk here at Catalyst Mike N. put forward an understanding of market forces Identity as a Commons. Looking at the how the vendors none of whom can capture the plain have staked out positions in the mountains.
Along those lines one of the topics we will talk about at the Identity Gang meeting tomorrow will be identity commons 2.0.

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Identity Woman Appears on Geek Entertainment Television!

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If you haven’t heard of geek entertainment television you should check it out. I made it on to one of their latest episodes. “What is the Square Root of Net” from the Net Squared conference. Of course my answer to the question was ‘identity’… I am the second to last on the clip so you can scroll to the end if you just want to see me :)..
Another episode that I quite like is one shown in the ‘how to video blog’ session that covered the Maker Faire including the mulit-story mechanical giraffe.
They Also have a recent episode from the NerdSalon on Roomba Cock Fighting.

Open Space for Identity in Vancouver in July

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This Identity Open Space is being jointly produced by Liberty Alliance and a group of people who are leading participants in the Internet Identity Workshop. We hope to provide attendees with a highly interactive format in which to explore the topic of user-centric identity. (((This is NOT the next IIW that Workshop2006b will be in November.)))
The goal of this support a face-to-face space to continue the emerging, ever changing conversation around identity. Not every one can be everywhere. It is our hope that it will provide an opportunity for those in the northwest (Oregon, Washington State, British Columbia) from a variety of fields – socially good techies, Web 2.0 innovators, Identity Gang participants to meet face to face and dialogue.
The wiki is here and registration here. Here is who is coming.
Topics likely to be discussed at the conference represent the many identity issues experts are working on today including:
* technical standards and specifications,
* use cases for a range of industries
* applying existing or emerging applications or platforms,
* Social and policy issues.
* Your Topics Post on the wiki

There are a lot of amazing minds working to solve the Internet’s ‘identity crisis’, and bringing them together frequently—formally and informally—is helping to drive tremendous progress in a marketplace full of pent-up demand for opportunities with truly empowered *end users* in the driver’s seat. – Brett McDowell, Director Liberty Alliance

Open Space meetings are successful because of the passion, energy and engagement of each and every attendee from the moment they decide to attend through their return to the workplace to implement what they experienced at the event—it’s truly a community-building event that doesn’t end. Building on our proven track record, this event will continue to expand participation in the conversation around the rapidly evolving identity landscape.
Kaliya Hamlin (aka Identity Woman) is the Open Space facilitator for this event. Rave reviews of the last Internet Identity Workshop she facilitated.
The fee will be $50 less if you are staying at the conference hotel please see the registration page for details.
Registration for Identity Open Space is $150 USD (June 16, 2006).
From June 17, 2006 – July 16, 2006 the price increases to $.
Onsite registration will be available at a fee of $300.
Accessibility is a core value of IIW – please contact me if you want cost is an issue for you.
Social Media:
The Tag for this event broadly is IdentityOS
The Tag for this specific event is IdentityOSVan

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Identity interoperability @ Net2

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In the panel on Social Networking here at Net2.
Identity and profile sharing between sites is critical to using these tools in civil society. Planetwork where I am Network Director has been a long time advocate for open standards in this sector – the Augmented Social Network paper outlined the vision. We are excited about Open Standards from OASIS – XRI (I-names) and XDI to support identity and data sharing. They are cooperating with the with OpenID on Yadis too.
Planetwork is working on a project to build out open source, open standards based infrastructure to make it all work.
I am also working on i-tags to support identity in tagging.

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