Big Ideas

its that SXSW picking time of year

Kaliya Young · August 18, 2009 · Leave a Comment

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

Missing: Privileged Account Management for the Social Web.

Kaliya Young · July 27, 2009 · 3 Comments

This year at SXSW I moderated a panel about OpenID, OAuth and data portability in the Enterprise. We had a community lunch after the panel, and walking back to the convention center, I had an insight about a key missing piece of software – Privileged Account Management (PAM) for the Social Web – how are companies managing multiple employees logging in to their official Twitter, Facebook and YouTube accounts?

I thought I should also explain some key things to help understand conventional PAM then get to social web PAM in this post covering:

regular identity management in the enterprise,
regular Privileged Account Management in the enterprise
Privileged Account Management for the Social Web.

1) IdM (Identity Management) in the Enterprise

There are two words you need to know to get IdM and the enterprise: “provisioning” and “termination“.

a) An employee is hired by a company. In order to login to the company’s computer systems to do their work (assuming they are a knowledge worker), they need to be provisioned with an “identity” that they can use to log in to the company systems.

b) When an employee leaves (retires, quits, laid off, fired), the company must terminate this identity in the computer systems so that the employee no longer has access to these systems.

The next thing to understand is logs.

So, an employee uses the company identity to do their work and the company keeps logs of what they do on company systems. This kind of logging is particularly important for things like accounting systems – it is used to audit and check that things are being accurately recorded, and who did what in these systems is monitored, thus addressing fraud with strong accountability.

I will write more about other key words to understand about IdM in the enterprise (authentication, authorization, roles, directories) but I will save these for another post.

2) Ok, so what is Privileged Account Management in the Enterprise?

A privileged account is an “über”-account that has special privileges. It is the root account on a UNIX system, a Windows Administrator account, the owner of a database or router access. These kinds of accounts are required for the systems to function, are used for day-to-day maintenance of systems and can be vital in emergency access scenarios.

They are not “owned” by one person, but are instead co-managed by several administrators. Failure to control access to privileged accounts, knowing who is using the account and when, has led to some of the massive frauds that have occurred in financial systems. Because of this, the auditing of logs of these accounts are now part of compliance mandates in

Sarbanes-Oxley
the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS),
the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC),
HIPAA.

Privileged Account Management (PAM) tools help enterprises keep track of who is logged into a privileged account at any given time and produce access logs. One way this software works is: an administrator logs in to the PAM software, and it then logs in to the privileged account they want access to. The privileged account management product grants privileged user access to privileged accounts [1].

Links to articles on PAM, [1] Burton Group Identity and Privacy Blog, KuppingerCole, Information Security Magazine.

3) Privileged Account Management on the Social Web.

Increasingly companies have privileged accounts on the social web. Dell computers has several for different purposes. Virgin America, (they link to the account from their website – thus “validating” that this is their real account), JetBlue, Southwest Airlines, Zappos CEO, (employees who twitter), Comcast Cares (Frank Eliason) (interestingly comcast on twitter is blank).

Twitter is just the tip of the iceberg – there are also “fan pages” on Facebook for brands. Coca-Cola, Zappos, NYTimes, Redbull, Southwest, YouTube Channels, Dunkin’ Donuts, etc, etc. on thousands of other platforms and yet-to-be-invented services.

These are very powerful accounts – they are managed and maintained by many employees around the clock and are the public voices of companies.

I have yet to see or hear of any software tools to enable enterprises to manage Social Web privileged accounts. How are companies managing access by multiple employees to these accounts?

Is there software that does this yet?

Is anyone working on these kinds of tools?

Leave your comments here or tweet with me @identitywoman

Legal Haze for Social networks. Identity and Freedom of Expression.

Kaliya Young · July 9, 2009 · 2 Comments

The picture pretty much sums the conundrum up.

Is it ok for individuals to promote pot on these social networking services?

Should social networks allow marijuana dispensaries to have organizational presences?

(from an e-mail from Fast Company promoting this article)

The question is, whose laws do social networks have to follow? The Web may seem borderless, but as companies like Google and Yahoo have found in China and, more recently, Twitter and Facebook found in Iran, virtual boundaries do exist. So what’s a company like Facebook or Twitter to do? It will be interesting to see how Silicon Valley finesses this one, particularly because the companies are based in California where the dispensaries are considered legitimate enterprises (at least in the eyes of the law).

I poked around on twitter and found a whole Marijuana movement
along with the Stoner Nation Facebook page and Stoner Nation Twitter and on Blogger and their own site.
Interestingly I searched in Facebook to find the stoner nation page and it was not listed when typed as two words but was when I typed it the way their name is listed as one word – StonerNation .
It is not a surprise to see seems there are many fans of Stoner Nation who are using Facebook accounts without their real names. Like Oregon Slacker , Stoner Stuff, and Drink Moxie.
I think this liminal space between the legal and illegal (at least this is factually the case in california) is quiet interesting. The freedom to express oneself and organize around change is something that is important to maintain on the web – clearly these three people have chosen to weave a line – expressing their opinion and support and involvement around marijuana online and not releasing their “real names” on facebook or twitter where they are expressing support and involvement in movement organizing but making the choice that saying who they are may negatively affect them in their ‘daily life’ – whether it be a small town where they live that would be unaccepting or a profession they hold that would not be understanding. I think these rights and issues go beyond “just” drug use but also extend to sexual and other minorities. The marijuana community is activating right now because there is a ballot initiative here in 2010 to legalize pot and tax it (potentially generating 1.2 billion dollars in revenue annually for the state).
I think a question we all have in building the evolving open and social web is how do we support citizens having the freedom to express themselves online and in social contexts. What are the particulars of online identity that enable this as a possibility and don’t rule the fundamental right of freedom of expression out? I am specifically thinking about the equivalent to anonymously joining a social movement march in the physical world.

SSN's can be guessed

Kaliya Young · July 6, 2009 · Leave a Comment

This just in from slashdot:

“The nation’s Social Security numbering scheme has left millions of citizens vulnerable to privacy breaches, according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, who for the first time have used statistical techniques to predict Social Security numbers solely from an individual’s date and location of birth. The researchers used the information they gleaned to predict, in one try, the first five digits of a person’s Social Security number 44 percent of the time for 160,000 people born between 1989 and 2003.

This is from the Wired coverage:

By analyzing a public data set called the “Death Master File,” which contains SSNs and birth information for people who have died, computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University discovered distinct patterns in how the numbers are assigned. In many cases, knowing the date and state of an individual’s birth was enough to predict a person’s SSN.

“We didn’t break any secret code or hack into an undisclosed data set,” said privacy expert Alessandro Acquisti, co-author of the study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We used only publicly available information, and that’s why our result is of value. It shows that you can take personal information that’s not sensitive, like birth date, and combine it with other publicly available data to come up with something very sensitive and confidential.”

Basically it means we shouldn’t be honest about our date of birth and home town on Facebook (or any other social network) or we are making ourselves vulnerable to discernment of our SSN’s. I wonder if they can figure out mine? I received my as an adult when I was attending college in California.

I decided to poke around and see what Facebook had up about Identity Theft. I did find a link to this study that created a profile by “Freddi Stauer,” an anagram for “ID Fraudster,”.

Out of the 200 friend requests, Sophos received 82 responses, with 72 percent of those respondents divulging one or more e-mail address; 84 percent listing their full date of birth; 87 percent providing details about education or work; 78 percent listing their current address or location; 23 percent giving their phone number; and 26 percent providing their instant messaging screen name.

Sophos says in most cases, Freddi also got access to respondents’ photos of friends and family, plus a lot of information about personal likes and dislikes, and even details about employers.

Facebook users were all too willing to disclose the names of spouses and partners, with some even sending complete resumes. One facebook user divulging his mother’s maiden name—the old standard used by many financial and other Web sites to get access to account information.

Most people wouldn’t give this kind of information out to people on the street but their guard sometimes seems to drop in the context of a friend request on the Facebook site, O’Brien says.

According to Sophos, the results of what it calls its Facebook ID Probe has significance for the workplace as well as personal life because businesses need to be aware that this type of social-networking site may pose a threat to corporate security.

I have tried to search the Facebook blog to see what they have to say about identity theft and apparently they haven’t mentioned it.

India says it will be creating National ID for Citizens

Kaliya Young · June 29, 2009 · 1 Comment

I found this last night on Slashdot – it was to important not to blog about. “India to Put All Citizen Info into Central Database”
Reading the article in The Independent this stood out for me

The creation of the ID or Unique Identification Number (UID) was a major plank of the manifesto of the ruling Congress Party during the recent election.

India is not a western democracy where “everyone” has papers and certificates of birth. As the article highlights

“This could be used as a security measure by the government which leaves migrant workers, refugees and other stateless people in India in limbo, without access to public services, employment and basic welfare.”

Our identities don’t come from government – they come from our social interactions and relationships.
The other issue that comes from this is “everyone in one database” is a giant honey pot.

Personal Anchor on the Web for Digital Identity – CC Images

Kaliya Young · June 16, 2009 · 2 Comments

I got a request for the images I posted in “Personal Anchors on the Web for Digital Identity” from David Larlet to use in a slide presentation in France. I decided to open them up and post them here.
Below are versions with english text and a version without english text.
[Read more…] about Personal Anchor on the Web for Digital Identity – CC Images

Personal Anchors on the Web for Digital Identities

Kaliya Young · June 16, 2009 · 4 Comments

I have been evangelizing about user-centric identity on the web 5 years. I talk about the ideas with people constantly explaining and re-explaining different developments in the field, forward looking projects and visionary ideas community members talk about. I watch what I say carefully and I notice when I start thinking and explaining something differently.

The new term that has emerged for me this week is “anchor on the web”... as in Where is your anchor on the web? or People have an anchor on the web – this is there “identity” – the question is do they control (owning a domain name) it or is it controlled by the company that does.

I link this metaphor because it evokes the image of a boat that is you and an anchor that is linking you to somewhere – do you want this to land in a stable place that you have control over? Likely yes – if you anchor to someone else’s ship (have your name in their domain space) you are literally tied to them. Rather then being able to visit them on your own terms and leave if you like.

You can get copies of these images under CC license here.

In my last post I talked about facebook URLs and people getting their own domain name along with the contrast of usability with each. Chris Messina also wrote about facebook URLs and correctly points out that this is a battle over your digital identity.

I got a comment today from IWantMyName.com (they also have a blog) saying I was absolutely right about usability issues that domain registrars have.

You are absolutely right. It’s a common problem of domain registrars / hosting providers. They’re too focused on up-selling other services and the secondary market instead of serving the actual internet user. We’re watching the identity community closely with iWantMyName and will definitely provide identity management features in the future. For now, we already made the domain registration process easy and are helping users setting up apps like Gmail, Tumblr, Posterous etc.

Coincidently – today at SemTech the CEO of Nombray presented as part of Chris Saad’s talk about DataPortability. They let you very easily create a website under your own domain name that aggregates your information from around the web. I haven’t paid the $10 yet but I was very impressed with the usability of the sign up process and you can see my the 1/2 working site here.

There is of course Chi.mp too – but some how it feels a bit more like being tied to somewhere then actually owning your own domain (paying for it) and setting up the services under it.

The next level of interoperability and user-empowerment will be the way these systems map/document your online life and how they give you the data in a standard way when you leave their service to go to a different one.

I am hopeful these sites are the basis of what will become personal data stores that project VRM has brainstormed about and people/companies are developing.

UpDate: Wow and that was Post: 1000 for this blog!

Last day of Early Bird Registration

Kaliya Young · April 1, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Today is the last day of early bird registration for the Internet Identity Workshop. No this is not an April Fools Joke either 🙂

The Relationship Paper

Kaliya Young · March 29, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Bob’s Relationship Paper is now available. If you haven’t read it yet – you should. It articulates a key point about the challenge regarding the current frame of social networks – relationships are just lines on a graph rather then being nodes that hold information about the nature and parameters of the relationship.

Getting OpenID to work – when oh when?

Kaliya Young · March 23, 2009 · 2 Comments

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

ID Panel at SXSW

Kaliya Young · March 15, 2009 · 1 Comment

TWITTER HASH TAG FOR THIS PANEL
#sxswid
our handles
@identitywoman
@bobblakley
@etelos
@jsmarr
Panel Outline
1) Brief Intro
2) CONTEXT – 15 min
5m – looking back – enterprise IdM 101 – Bob Blakley
5m – SaaS is happening – Danny Kolke
5m – OpenID and Oauth
3) Discussion – 15-20min
4) Questions
LUNCH AFTERWARDS
we are heading over to Austin Iron Works to continue the conversation
http://idsxsw.eventbrite.com/
The next community event
INTERNET IDENTITY WORKSHOP
www.internetidentityworkshop.com

Am I to "old" to get Facebook? – or do they not get it?

Kaliya Young · March 14, 2009 · 6 Comments

I am at SXSW this morning. I just came from the session “Is Privacy Dead or Just Very Confused?” about the difference between private and public spheres and how they are contextual and social contract dependent. They talked about how strange facebook was for merging all ones contexts together (this is my own critique of it). This post was written while listening to Dave Morin talk about the future of the facebook platform “The Search for a More Social Web” (it was really a product plug) – As he oppened the talk he gave us a history of human communication that had the personal computer preceding the ARPA Net (clearly he would benefit from a visit to the Computer History Museum where we hold the Internet Identity Workshop twice a year). While listening I can’t help but keep wondering if I am just to “old”.
When I was in my first year of university at UC Berkeley the web was just beginning to diffuse to widespread use in that context. We had LAND LINES then. I spent $300 a month on long distance to talk to friends back home in canada. I was not “socially” connected via electronic media back then. Some people from my “old lives” have found me in facebook but I don’t feel “socially connected” to them in that I really don’t think they care about what I am “doing now on the web” and I don’t really have an ongoing social relationship with them so that i want to know “all” about what they are doing. They are NOT my “friends” but in facebook they “are”. I don’t want to be rude and unfriend them I am “interested” in their lives – like would be interested in hearing from them once every couple months but they are not in my social world.
I notice a real gap between myself and those 10 years younger then me who had facebook IN highschool and college – they love it cause it keeps them connected to their “friends”. I wonder about this cultural social time divide.
Today I am hearing facebook talk again about how they have people’s “real identities” with their “real names” and how important this is for authenticity. Dave Morin is going around convincing people to switch from their online personal handles in twitter to their “real” names. I thought about just being “Kaliya” in twitter but decided that my online twitter persona and voice would be that of my “professional” self – “IDENTITY WOMAN” I do talk about some personal things I do and mention opinions outside of “just my professional self” but it is not “me” there are ideas and opinions and things i do on the web that are not for everyone to see and I don’t share them in twitter. What I don’t like about facebook and the idea of facebook connect is that it feeds “everything you do” by default to “everyone you know” (within that system – they call these people “friends”). I want to present different selves to different audiences not because I want to “hide” but because I am connected to very diverse communities/friends and they all don’t want to hear about everything I am going everywhere it is to much “social noise.”
I am not sure if Facebook understands that having people use their “Real Names” is not actually what creates authenticity – the issue has been on the web is not “who you are in real life” but the inability to have online persona’s that are persistent over time and context. The investment into these and the ability to have them be useful has not been solved until recently. Bob (his blog is Cesi n’est pas un Bob – a reference to the Rene Magritte painting Ceni n’est pas une pipe/This is not a pipe) and the folks at the Burton Group have been talking about the possibility of people creating Limited Liability Persona’s to create persona’s on the web that are linked to “you” if something goes wrong but is not linked.
The audience of mostly young men in their 20’s and 30’s many of them “developers” on the facebook platform cheered all that was announced today by Dave Morin. I was left wondering and wrote this post as a response.
I am a member of the bridge generation – between the hyper connected young “digital natives” and the digital immigrants. (I was on BBS’s in Highschool (the local school board set one up just for kids within the city school system – that is where I hung out). My child hood home had a rotary telephone). while on vacation in Canada this summer I was struck by the conversations that I overheard by people older then me dabbling in facebook and being kind of freaked out by it. (In Canada Facebook has much higher penetration into the “general” population). The conversations I was having with highlevel leaders in the nonprofit and social business world at a retreat I was at about the dangers of building on closed silo’s like facebook was just beginning to dawn on them – they now understood. I am also a woman and the conversation we had at She’s Geeky regarding women and their presentation of self and identity online was really good. WE ARE DIFFERENT then dudes in their 20’s in San Francisco.
So I wonder… Am I to “old” to get Facebook? – or do they not get it? “it” being the needs of older people and the ability to control in more fine grained ways what people see about me. “it” being the needs of women in social space online.
We shall see.

Internet Identity Workshop May 18-20

Kaliya Young · March 5, 2009 · Leave a Comment

We have opened registration for the 8th Internet Identity Workshop! May 18-20th in Mountain View California.
There are a few things that are different this time around….
We have a shinny new website/blog!
Thanks to Mary Ruddy, Stas Zubalevich and Pam Dingle for helping make it happen.
We are using eventbrite to do registration – and we will be displaying the names of those who are registered.
We are asking questions as you register about what you hope accomplish /talk about at IIW and publishing them.
We have responded to the economic times and lowered the price for the first month of registration (a $50 discount for independents and a $75 for everyone else).
We have an early registration goal of 75 people by the end of the month.
We are starting on Monday morning with a hands on introduction to identity technologies and we will being participant generated sessions at 1pm on Monday.
Demo’s – community sharing of projects and products will happen on Tuesday afternoon.
We are being we have a sub theme that we are promoting – “what are the business models for identity” this is so that “business” oriented folks will attend and hopefully get some where answering this. (we might have some other explicit sub-themes we name as the workshop approaches and community members give feedback on key topics that are arising/need attention)
We will have a different venue for Tuesday night dinner!
Travel is cheaper then ever (so even though your budgets are lower you should be able to make it here for less).
The blog will have guest posts by community members leading up to the conference. (if you want to say something here just let me know)
We will have had the ID-Legal conference in April and will have a cool map of the gap between identity technologies and different legal lenses.
The same….
* We have blog badges for you to use in your posts – put on your blogs.
* We will have Monday night dinner at Tied House
* We will give community awards open style at the end of Wednesday. (if you want to be the wine/other gift buyer or donor let us know)
* The Avante (our conference hotel) will Rock!

Sense Making for Internet Identity

Kaliya Young · February 26, 2009 · 1 Comment

Eugene Kim has launched a Sense Making webinars to help people understand and act on complex, current topics related to collaboration.
The first one will be about Internet Identity and Gabe Wachob will be “coaching” it.

Digital identity has always posed unique social and technical challenges centered around security, privacy, and convenience. The Internet has made these challenges even more complex. The good news is that a number of new technologies are creating new opportunities for creating a secure and private Internet, where individuals are in control of their own data. This is a win-win scenario, because it creates new opportunities for service providers. The challenge is that this area is complex and rapidly changing.
Our coach, Gabe Wachob, will help you navigate this space quickly and act on this information intelligently. He will:
* Help you understand the challenges unique to Internet-scale digital identity and how these new technologies fit into Web 2.0 and the enterprise.
* Walk you through the alphabet soup of Internet Identity (from OpenID to Information Cards to oAuth and XRD), including how these technologies are being used, how they’re evolving, and what their practical limitations are today.
* Give you insight and access into the community that is developing these technologies, and explain how you can influence their evolution.
* Work with you on the aspects of Internet Identity that are most relevant to you.

If you are struggling to figure this stuff out – I recommend this offering.

Participatory Panopticon strikes Michael Phelps

Kaliya Young · February 6, 2009 · 3 Comments

I have written about the participatory panopticon before (we live in public, sousveilance, cia torture taxi’s, Jamais Casio @ accelerating change, Condi caught) – but more in the abstract about stories in the news. This is the Huffington Post article about the photo of michael phelps.
This story strikes more close to home. I was, in my first career, an athlete competing at the Olympic level. In 1996 I was an “olympic year tournament” for Women’s water polo (only the men competed in the olympics) in 1998 I played in the World Championships in Perth Australia and in 1999 I won a gold medal at the Pan American Games (an event run by the Olympic committees of countries in north and south america). I also retired following that event and the following year many of my friends on the National team and college team competed in the Olympic Games. (if you want to see some of what is on the web re: that time of life for me search “Kaliya Young” & “water polo” )

So with this caveat – we were very dedicated athletes – we trained hard, we never went out and partied while we in Montreal our training home base – (a notorious “party town”). After a big event – like any one of the tournaments listed above we would for a brief night or two – take a break – go out and yes many of on the team would get drunk. ((No one our team didn’t have any pot heads on it but the difference between Pot and Alcohol is minimal.)) Some of us on those evening would do things that wouldn’t be great to have posted on the internet for posterity. That is to say maybe 3 times a year many of our team would celebrate together out and get slightly inebriated.
In sports you get insulated – all you do is TRAIN – TRAIN – TRAIN. You don’t party or socialize much at all. I spent 20 hours a week for years in the water at the peak of my training with no summer’s off, no christmas’ – maybe 10 days a year off to visit my family. Michael Phelps was probably spending 30-40 hours a week being an athlete. So once you win – and Phelps won big – you take a break – you go and do a few things in moderation that people your age do all the time every week. Give him a break.
In reading this quote the thing that I think the person who decided to break the veil of his privacy – to “out” his supposed indiscretion should be outed too….

Whoever it was who had the camera to hand to snap Phelps apparently smoking marijuana through a glass pipe, somewhat unfortunately called a bong, made a few quid, but, in those few seconds, Phelps lost his reputation, his aura and, possibly, tens of millions of dollars in earnings from sponsors.

OpenID Momentum continues

Kaliya Young · January 16, 2009 · 3 Comments

Dave posted today on the OpenID.net blog articulating the accomplishments of the past year.
I think it is important to acknowledge the significant progress OpenID as an Open Standard for persistent digital identity across the web has made. It is amazing to think how far it has come in 2.5 years since IIW1.
Recently I was talking with a person knowledgeable about the identity community and OpenID in particular – they mentioned that some of the conversations amongst those running for the board didn’t help the community look “good”. I said to them you know a lot of communities have elections and there is 6 board seats open and 6 people running for them – so there really isn’t a dialogue, public conversation that has texture (a different word for conflicting points of view). I celebrate a community that can dive in and engage with a range of points of view and really have a meaty dialogue. This is to be celebrated – the pains of growing up.
Wired just did a detailed article on OpenID’s and Blog commenting. It closed with this… NB: Before you race to point out the irony that this particular blog doesn’t support OpenID logins for comments, I can assure you — we’re working on it.
It also said this:

It’s easier for blogs, which don’t need a lot of demographic information about a user, to let people jump in and start participating socially without filling out a registration form. Major media properties and newspaper websites, on the other hand, want age and income data they can use to sell more targeted ads. OpenID and its companion technologies have mechanisms for sites to collect that data from their users, but those mechanisms are largely left out of the blog commenting systems.

It makes me sad to see this. I was just signing up for a topica list – it asked me for my gender the year I was born and my zip code. It is trying to figure out who I am. What I don’t think is well understood is how information sharing happens over time. Asking people to give away PII (personally identifying information) to look at a newspaper is bad practice and encourages lying.

Identity events of the year – Part 2

Kaliya Young · January 3, 2009 · 1 Comment

This is part 2 and continues from part 1. I will re post this caveat again.
I am not going to do a “top ten list” – not really my style. I tend to take things as they are and appreciate the amazing, wonderful, mysterious, sensuous, intellectually stimulating but don’t “compare” in a sort of ordered list way. So just so there is clarity on the number of things I mention I will “number” them but this is NOT a top ten list – I wrote this post as a reflection without thought to order.
(un5) The emergence of Portable Contacts was a great development out of the Data Sharing Events that I put on with Laurie. The conversation between Joseph and the MSFT guys (Indu and Angus) lead to this – sort of a practical low hanging fruit thing to do – rather then solve everything – just how to get the list of contacts I have in one place out and importable to another. Joseph’s community leadership has really impressed me to. He is all about getting things done and finding the needed elements to make things happen.
(un6) I have enjoyed watching Marc draw on his fence – yes he does this literally – and talk about his vision of the social web evolving. He “published” a book containing some of what he has been talking about. You can describe Marc as many things but I for one respect him as a visionary – ahead of his time in seeing where things will be going on the web and what will be needed. (You can see his predictions for 2009 here) Just as an example of something he said that really struck me as original and important to think about looking ahead – he talked about how groups need to live autonomously – outside any one platform or silo – and that we need a language of social verbs that are open and standard across them. Maybe some more people will “get” what Marc has been saying in this regard and some open standards can evolve to address this.
(un7) In a year end review it would be a mistake to not name the IDTBD conversation that happened this summer. You can read the whole thread of the e-mail conversation in the google group – it is public. There were in the end two different ways to look at how to organize (and I think they can complementary) one put organizational form and structure first and the other put relationship and community first and said that needed form and structure could emerge from that. In the middle of the conversation we were referred to Clay Shirky’s work – both this video about LOVE in technical communities and how it is very long lasting and sustaining and his book – the power of organizing without organization. (He also has another talk about Coordination Costs that is informative). Identity Commons is an organization being held together with many of the new super low cost tools that mean organizational overhead that was needed to organize people as organized as we are isn’t needed like it was 5-10 years ago. Having said this there is much to be improved and in the survey we sent out after IIW we asked about IC and the community wanted us to focus on supporting/providing better communication between groups and also increased PR/outside world awareness of the collaborative work happening in the community.
(un8) The OpenID Foundation part of the Identity Commons community held its first elections for the community seats on the board.
(un9) Information Card Foundation launched and is part of the community of Identity Commons. I have been quite impressed with the energy and evangelism of Charles Andres. (they too are using a low organizational overhead model for getting things done). I actually got a the Azigo card selector working on my Mac and downloaded a “managed” card from an early behind the scenes trial of CivicID. I also failed at getting an “I’m over 18 card from Equifax” – Actually the experience of their knowledge based authentication made me think my identity has been “stolen” it asked me about a bunch of loans I haven’t taken out. So now I have a bunch of personal identity detective work to do this year (I will be blogging about those adventures).
(un10) Parity Communications shipped some pretty amazing stuff and it has been a long time coming*. They are behind the Equifax I’m over 18 card issuing site using their service called Card Press for issuing information cards. (as an aside I “get the whole stock photo with people holding their hands in a card shape – but why the girl with no top on?)
* Some background I first talked to Paul Trevithic and Mary Ruddy in the winter of 2004 while working for Identity Commons I knew I had to go out and meet them – to learn what they were up to and hopefully link/sync it with what Owen, Andrew & Drummond&Co. were up to around user-centric identity. They were into Social physics along with John Clippinger and both Paul and John were at the 2004 Planetwork Conference.
Over all it was an amazing year and it seems that the coming year will continue to have this field evolve.
I am working hard on pulling together two events before the next IIW (May 18-20 – put it on your calendars). One is specifically focused on “What are the Business Models” we should have an announcement about that next week but the dates will be the last week of Feb.
The other is focused on the intersection of identity technologies and the legal realm – I am meeting face to face with Lucy Lynch from ISOC in Eugene this week to work on details for that.
The Identity Futures group continues to percolate along and is working on developing a proposal to do some scenario visioning/planning.
I am hoping to spend some more time thinking about and talking to women to understand more about their needs and practices around identity online. Just in the last week while organizing She’s Geeky (the women’s only tech conference happening at the end of January) two women have mentioned they have had online stalker experiences recently. Several also have very particular ways of presenting themselves one example is a woman who professionally they use their first initial and last name – when they submit resume’s etc and in their general life online/socially they use their First name and last initial – to ensure that they are not findable at least by an employer initially doesn’t know their full name and thus their gender.