Identity Woman
Independent Advocate for the Rights and Dignity of our Digital Selves
We had a huge turnout for the Drupal meetup around 36 people came at it peak. Pictures here. I posted the overall notes for the meeting here. There were two break out specific sets of notes Media and Community. It was fun to facilitate the meeting. about 1/3 of the folks are going to be at the DrupalCon. I hope that we can build on some of the issues that arose in the meeting.
Technorati Tags: Drupal
This headline gave me a big chuckle today on the news stand. I thought given the seriousness of what is going on in DC you also might enjoy reading this news just out from the The Onion (which is even cooler cause it is built on Drupal).
The recent leak revealing Santa Claus to be “your mommy and daddy” has been linked to President Bush’s senior political adviser and deputy chief of staff Karl Rove.
“If this devastating leak, which severely undermines the security of children everywhere and has compromised parent-child relations, came from the highest levels of the White House, that is an outrage,” said former Bush counterterrorism adviser and outspoken Bush Administration critic Richard Clarke.
The identity of the mythical holiday gift-giver, previously known only in grown-up circles, was published in the popular Timbertoes cartoon in the December issue of Highlights For Children. Jean Abrams, a conservative firebrand known to have close ties to Bush appointees in the Department of Education, revealed “Santa” to be a code name for anonymous parental gift-giving.
Who are you, what do you do, who are you loyal to and why? These deeper questions of identity weave throughout the narrative of Syriana. Yesturday I saw the movie for the second time (the first time was Saturday). As I do everything these days – I kept ‘identity’ in mind and it made it even more depth and intesnsity. I would recommend it to you all.
It is a political economy thriller (my favorite kind). It touches on a range of the complex issues of today’s world.
Identity arises again and again. I am going to write more about this after I see it a third time today.
To follow up on the Orwell post…
Daniel Solove has a great book out about digital identity and the challenges that we face today with it. He likens the situation we face with our digital dossiers to that of The Trial as opposed to they typical Orwellian metaphor – often apt but not the only applicable one. This reality is all to familiar for those trapped in the hall of mirrors called the ‘No Fly List.’ …..
Sarah Zapolsky was checking in for a flight to Italy when she discovered that her 9-month-old son’s name was on the United States’ “no fly” list of suspected terrorists.
“We pointed down to the stroller, and he sat there and gurgled,” Zapolsky said, recalling the July incident at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C. “The desk agent started laughing…She couldn’t print us out a boarding pass because he’s on the no-fly list.”
Zapolsky, who did not want her son’s name made public, said she was initially amused by the mix-up. “But when I found out you can’t actually get off the list, I started to get a bit annoyed.”
She isn’t alone.
According to the Transportation Security Administration, more than 28,000 people have applied to the TSA redress office to get on the “cleared list,” which takes note of individuals whose names are similar to those on the terrorism watch list, but even getting on that list does not guarantee an end to hassles related to the no-fly list.
The TSA does not reveal how many or which names are actually on the list, and complaints do not get names removed, since those names are also those of suspected terrorists. The best that innocent travelers can hope for is a letter from the TSA that it says should facilitate travel but is no panacea.
In addition to babies, the victims of mistaken identity on the no-fly list have included aging retirees and public figures such as Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, Republican Rep. Don Young of Alaska and Democratic Rep. John Lewis of Georgia.
“It’s a significant problem,” said Brenda Jones, the spokeswoman for Rep. Lewis, who travels by plane at least twice a week. She said the congressman had written to the TSA, but “he is still on the no-fly list, and the problems persist.”
Secretive list
While the number of suspected terrorists on the list is unknown, aviation sources estimate that it includes tens of thousands of names, if not more.
TSA spokesman Christopher White said the agency has seven people working full-time on processing applications to get on the cleared list. Considering the number of applications, that works out to less than 4,000 complaints per redress officer.
“We do take the cleared list very seriously, and it’s also important for us to focus on the right people. It does us no good to focus on the wrong John Doe,” White said.
Cleared individuals receive a letter from the TSA saying, “we have provided sufficient personal information to the airlines to distinguish you from other individuals” but cautions that “TSA cannot ensure that your travel will be delay-free.”
John Graham, a 63-year-old former Department of State official, said his TSA letter had not helped at all.
“I’m at a point now where I don’t really care whether my name is on the list as a mistake, as mistaken identity or whether someone at TSA does intend to hassle me. The fact is, there’s a total absence of due process,” he said.
The American Civil Liberties Union calls the no-fly list system unconstitutional, saying it treats people as guilty without a trial and unfairly deprives them of freedoms. It also says the system is an inaccurate and ineffective security method.
Despite efforts by the TSA to address complaints and concerns about the no-fly list, ACLU attorney Reggie Shuford said very little had changed to improve the process.
“We continually hear from people being caught up on the no-fly list with the same frustrating experiences and inability to get off the list,” he said.
Peter Johnson, a retired bibliographer at Princeton University, said travel became “hellish” after he discovered his name was on the no-fly list in August 2004.
“I’m not sure if what’s behind this is an effort to simply control people or if it’s largely mismanagement and poorly conceptualized programming,” Johnson said, adding that a TSA official had told him that there were more than 2,000 other Peter Johnsons in the United States who reported similar problems.
My good friend had a Bush Cheney sticker on his car bumper…I did a double take…he didn’t vote for Bush, they are not running again…ahh the year 1984. Subtle but to the point. The latest wire tapping scandal is not cool. Mitch Radcliff sums it up well.
Bush says he signed NSA wiretap order
Adds he OK’d program more than 30 times, will continue to do so
In acknowledging the message was true, President Bush took aim at the messenger Saturday, saying that a newspaper jeopardized national security by revealing that he authorized wiretaps on U.S. citizens after September 11.
“Yesterday the existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports, after being improperly provided to news organizations. As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk.”
Look at that. It’s disgusting.
The President broke the law, based on repeated rulings of the courts for decades that prohibit surveillance of U.S. citizens within the United States without court orders. Now, he’s trying to blame the messenger who revealed his continued flaunting of civil rights. Just more of the same hypocrisy, the same fear-mongering, the same wiping of his nose on the Constitution.
So we have a great time at the workshop yesterday. Eugene gave a great over view of “the problem” and why pinging a third party identity broker/provider would be a good evolution.
Johannes gave a great overview of the space URL based identifiers (YADIS – currently looking for a new name), WS* (Microsoft) and Liberty Alliance.
Dave presented about OpenID,
John presented about SXIP 2.0,
Drummond on XRI and
Eugene again about Yoke – the I-broker for the masses.
Mary Hodder shared here use of identity for her video community.
Tom from Opinity shared how they are using identity for their reputation network.
Marc Canter shared his use of identity (specifically SXIP) in GoingOn across networks and communities.
Chirs Allen shared some use cases for networks where he needs identity.
I closed out by talking about the new identity commons ‘clear focus.
the developers who attended expressed their interest in being there and we broke for lunch.
All had a good time and much networking happened.
I posted this on the Identity Gang list back in October. Dick Hart made the assertion that there was no such thing as post post-modernism. I had to chime in.. because it does indeed exist and it relates to identity.
Modernism has its origins in the enlightment ‘rationalism’, absolute
structure and finding ‘the truth’.
Post-Modernism is a critique to modernism. In this structure, there
are no laws maintained to define hierarchical culture. Post-modernism
that asserts that there no hierarchies and that all points of view are
equally valid (except that this is a hierarchy itself putting
non-hierarchy above hierarchy)
Today you have the emergence of Post-post-modernism. It rejects the
“flat” – everything is equal point of view of of post-moderninsm but
not super structured rationalism like Modernism. You might call it a
Polyarchy. Polyarchy was a term that I first heard when Drummond and
Kim were talking. Keep reading through the links…
As if Post-Modernism is not bad enough, reporter Alexandra Jacobs of
the New York Observer claimed her experience aboard the Jet Blue
flight that made an emergency landing at LAX on Wednesday night was
Post-Post-Modern. She said tvs on the plane were showing Fox News and MSNBC coverage of their own demise.
You can hear her talk about it on last week’s This American LIfe
“Back From The Dead” 10/7 – Episode 299
However, some differences are emerging that mark a new phase of
counter culture. One of the most obvious sign of this is the
reemergence of massive protests making flesh the networking of
cultural players who formally would have nothing to do with one
another. Examples of this abound: “teamsters and turtles,” garment
workers of the developing world with college students, anti-war
Republicans. Some may refer to what is going on today as post-post
modernism or hyper-post modernism, others might refer to it as the era
of Globalization.
In the polyarchic system, world politics is no longer essentially
“international” politics, where who gets what, when and how is
determined on the basis of bargaining and fighting among the
nation-states; rather, the international system is now seen as one of
subsystems of a larger and more complex field of relationships.
Panarchy, Polyarchy and Personarchy indicate that what is aimed at is:
– a worldwide open framework free from territorial sovereignties.
– a variety of voluntary systems of personal and social organization,
like parallel autonomous societies, even within the same territory.
– full freedom of association, circulation and action for each and
every human being.
mmm… sounds like people empowerd with their own identities and the
ability to use them to organize and empower themselves in civil
society and the marketplace.
I first heard the term Polyarchy when Drummond, myself and Paul
Trevithic were in Kim’s Cameron’s enjoying a glass of wine. Kim and
Drummond began bantering back and forth about this critical consept
that perhaps defines the what is ‘new’ and a critical underlying
principle in the coming identity layer of the interent.
There is no standard way in generic URI syntax to express “cross
hierarchy” relationships, a directory concept known as polyarchy. Yet
those of us working on the OASIS XRI TC have found polyarchy (which we call cross-references) as essential to the “internetworking of
multiple identifier schemes” as TCP/IP packet exchange is to the
internetworking of multiple LAN protocols.
Kim Cameron is a co-author of this paper on polyarchy.
We describe a new information structure composed of multiple
intersecting hierarchies, which we call Polyarchies. Visualizing
polyarchies enables use of novel views for discovery of relationships
which are very difficult using existing hierarchy visualization tools.
So there is post-post modernism – it is polyarchical. Polyarchy is a
critcial if little talked about property of emerging identity
protocols.
While we will be hanging out at Syndicate this week singing “Kum Bah Ya” about new “standards” for micro content and structured blogging and the announcement about i-tags. There is an impending “identity powder keg” that could go off this week in Califorina (and across the country) with the pending execution of Tookie Williams on Tuesday December 13th.
I googled – “Identity” and “Tookie” some interesting articles came up. They get to the heart of one element of ‘identity’ to have a meaningful place in a socio-cultural context. To be seen by others (afterall identity is what others say about us).
From Black News.com:
In a candid, and revealing moment, Stanley “Tookie” Williams told a visitor at San Quentin prison that he helped found the notorious Crips street gang because he wanted to smash everyone, make a rep, get respect and dignity, and that he wanted his name to be known everywhere. He got his wish in more ways than he ever dreamed of. The demons that drove Williams in his reckless push for identity and prominence also drove him to become the nation’s best known condemned prisoner. He faces execution December 13 for multiple murders.
William’s revelatory glimpse into his thug past tells much about the anger, alienation, and desperation that have turned legions of young black men into social pariahs, and that propel them to wreak murder and mayhem in mostly poor, black communities. But today’s Tookies didn’t crop up from nowhere. The transformation in the early 1970s of the old-line civil rights groups into business, and professional friendly organizations, and black middle-class flight from the inner city neighborhoods, left the black poor, especially young black males, socially fragmented, politically rudderless, and economically destitute. Lacking visible role models of success and achievement, and competitive technical skills and professional training to compete in a rapidly shifting economy, they were shoved even further to the outer margins of American society.
This is the title of an article just out this weekend in Network World.
It is by David Mcaplin a senior architect at Epok. Here is an exerpt.
Metadata isn’t limited to alternative identifiers. Imagine that an XRI-identified resource is a technical manual, available as a PDF or Word document and retrievable from a variety of mirrored network locations via various protocols. In a broad sense, the manual is the same document irrespective of where it is located, how it is retrieved or in what format it is represented. XRIs are ideally suited for identifying resources at this level of abstraction because the resolution process lets the consuming application choose the best network location, retrieval method and file format for its needs from the available options.
Like URIs, XRIs are composed of an authority portion and a path portion. XRI resolution converts the authority portion and the path portion of an XRI to an XML document called an XRIDescriptor. The XRIDescriptor describes the identified resource and the means by which the digital representation of the resource can be retrieved. By providing an additional level of in direction away from concrete instances of a resource, XRIs provide a permanent, unbreakable reference on which stable business relationships can be based.
There is a great diagram on the next page.
I was reading this months issue of wired the one with the smilie Oil blobs on it. I came across this little article about Pandora. It is the GREAT Juke box program. You enter a song you like and it uses a mathematical algorithm to find other music by different artist that is similar. I have been listening this morning. I LOVE it. The user interface is very slick. It actually has articulate things to say about the music too – when you click on ‘why did you play this’. Perhaps I will actually define my musical identity after all.
Technorati Tags: identity, Userinterface, usability
Since working in this field I have begun to see all things through the lens of Identity. It is really deep philosophically – touching on the deepest aspects personal meaning – those things that we identify with. I found a book in used book store called Your Identity Zones: Who Am I? Who are you? Who do we get along?
I have just begun to skim over the contents. Identity for this author has two primary elements Affiliations and Values. “Identity Zones” are the ways you can measure the role affiliations and values play in your life. It seems like an interesting self reflection process.
Technorati Tags: identity
This news just out.
Yahoo Bought Delicious.
Now I am not sure how I feel about this. Now they own two of the major tagging sites.
These are my tags on my photos and my bookmarks. How can we get out of pattern giant identity silos buying up other services? I want an integrated Identity on the web that I manage weaving together tools and services that are useful to me not just handy cause they are in one of the mega silos.
Hopefully they will avoid the major faux-pas that happened with Flickr where they asked users to to enter a yahoo ID instead of their existing Flickr account.
The Internet Identity Workshop presents an
Informational Morning for Developers

Hosted by Doc Searls,Mary Hodder and Kaliya Hamlin
Monday, December 12, 2005 9-12 noon, with lunch from 12-1

Canton Dim Sum @ 655 Folsom St in San Francisco.

Cost $20 for lunch (PLEASE RSVP HEREas the Canton Restaurant has been kind enough to give us the space if we all have lunch there, but we need an accurate count by Sunday at noon).
If you are a developer working on a application that has folks login – this is a morning for you.
Doc Searls will begin the day giving an overview of the identity landscape. He and others will answer the question:
* Why do identity systems matter when building new systems and tools?
We are bringing together a spectrum of folks who have been working on developing identity systems and tools. Identity Developers will share their work, basics and best practices to date to get started exploring integrating identity into these applications. These include YADIS, LID, Open ID, i-names/XRI, SXIP, among others.
Developers of applications who have included identity into their services and tools will share briefly how they’ve done it. Application developers will hear from and meet with identity developers to ask questions.
Event Info
Detailed Agenda
and RSVP here.
(sorry for the 2nd post on this blog but it finally sound.
Mary Hodder, Identity Woman Kaliya and Doc Searls are hosting an Internet Identity Workshop informational morning on December 12th at the Canton Won Ton at Folsom and Third in downtown San Francisco. It is before the Syndicate conference workshops that start in the afternoon.
The event starts at 9 goes to 12 with lunch after that. Cost is $20 for lunch.
It will be a very interactive event and you will get to meet all the key identity developers and an overview of options to build identity into systems.
You will need to sign up on the wiki.
I found this post on Life Hacker about ‘future proofing your e-mail addresses’. This is one of the frames we use to talk about digital identity too. They have a bunch of tips and in the comments someone pointed to this service Net Identity.

They lease out sub-domains of popular last names; i.e. john@smith.net . While you don’t technically own the domain, its a great half way for people who dont need a website, but are willing to pay for an easy to remember name. Although they also do offer a matching website, www.john.smith.net. Ive been using them for over 4 years and love it. They offer POP3, webmail, and other goodies for about $30 a year.
The guys at Bryght (they are really bright) are organizing an Open CMS Summit in February. It is a great idea. (They have on their list of things to talk about ‘identity and authentication – in fact it is on the top of their list. RIGHT ON)
I would like to ad and expand on the list. These communities coming together are diverse and have a range of needs. It is not just ‘developers’ coming together to code together.
Face time amongst this diverse groups needs to be used to
Technorati Tags: Bryght, Drupal, identity, nptech, Opensource, usability
Doc wrote this great post up about Identity reaching the STAGS – Subject That Actually Goes Somewhere about a year ago. There are great things coming up next week is an XRI/XDI workshop Dec 5th. pre Syndicate workshop on identity Dec 12th details coming soon.
There is some intense stuff happening over in telecommunications regulation land that has significant implications for the interent. Susan Crawford has been blogging on this extensively. (She is now a member of ICANN’s board so).
Bruce Kushnick, of Tele-the-truth, (said with at Brooklyn, Italian accent),
has come up with some new Vocab to describe what is going on.
The Telecom Act giveth and the FCC taken away. The definition of ‘deregulation’ is — those with the most amount of money and influence win!
Deregulation was ‘open the network to competition’. Now ‘deregulate the wires’ means deregulate the incumbent from previous laws to open the network to competition.
I think it’s time for some new terms.
Terminator-egulate — To kill previous regulation
Fib-erize — To continue to promise fiber optics to the press
release.
Liaregulation or Sayanythingulation. — The uncommittment of
whatever you committed to
Derrieregulation — Sit on your ass, claiming you’re doing
everything in your power to compete.
Astroturegulation — Get 50 ethnic, hispanic, black, asian, Jewish,
Christian, Muslim, disabled, senior groups to claim you need new financial incentives and more deregulation.
Killeregulation — Death to VOIP, Munis, anything that moves.
Technorati Tags: Vocabwatch
This is great. Click on it and hit refresh and it reloads new squares. It is basically a bit more elegant UI for the Buzzphraser.
Some on the list suggest Identity 2.0. I think maybe YADIS would be great.
I haven’t done this in a while but i am going to start “Vocab Watching” again. Highlighting the crazy new words that get made to describe stuff in this ever changing world.
Bliki from Riffs
Bliki is a combination of two popular internet interfaces: blogs and wikis.
A blog is your online journal. A wiki is an application that allows users to modify any portion of a document. A Bliki is a combination of these two things—the community, including you, decides on the content for any given item, whose reviews are the best, what things or topics are the most important to riff about, and how those riffs should be organized and annotated.
Technorati Tags: Vocabwatch, Web2.0
Invitation to learn more i-names and datasharing using XRI and XDI by Andy Dale on the afternoon of Monday December 5th.
Who will find this workshop useful?
Those who want to have data from web-based applications (i.e. transaction processing, membership management) as well as basic forms (i.e. registration, surveys, etc.) integrate automatically with the back-end databases. Â
Those creating an ecologies of services where users move between different sites regularly, where having a smoother user experience would serve everyone. Web 2.0 companies.Â
The audience for this is ‘product managers’ and execs from the dozens of  the dozens of membership management software vendors, etc. and those who want to do interoperability between various systems.Â
Augmented Social Network is the visionary paper that grounds a lot of this work. Excerpts from the paper are on my blog here.
What will you learn about?
You will learn what they can do now and the schedule for the next pieces of the infrastructure being ready. Free i-names will be discussed and the type of functionality they can start to provide people with i-names that no other technology will give them.
A picture will be painted of the functional revolution that occurs when people aggregate their own data under their own control and how that lets any service provider give better service.
People will leave the workshop with an understanding that they can start to implement “Identity Centric Architecture” today and how that will benefit them and their members/customers.
Cost
FREE! (because we love you and want to offer a barrier free opportunity to learn more and join the community of implementors in a face-to-face way). All you have to do is RSVP to Justine [ justine.hirsch [AT]ootao [Dot] comjustine.hirsch [AT]ootao [Dot] com] and come.
Where
It will be at ooTao’s offices in Alameda. 3rd Floor, 1080 Marina Village Parkway. Right across the bridge from Oakland
Who is Andy?
Andy builds enterprise software and within the last 8 months has been working on building enterprise quality applications using these tools. He articulates these standards with amazing clarity drawing on his real experience implementing them.
Who else is behind this event?
Kaliya Hamlin the Network Director at Planetwork is helping organize the event. She writes the Identity Woman Blog and works with companies in the XRI/XDI ecology. She is happy to answer questions about the field at =Kaliya
Agenda
This agenda and address is on the wiki and will be updated.
Please go to the wiki and share – who you are – why you are coming; your use cases; what you want to learn and how this 3 hours can be of most benefit to you.
There are 3 basic levels of integration, or engagement, that are possible with the evolving social and dataweb standards:
• Single Sign On
• Publish data from your system
• Consume Data Shared from other systems
We will explore these implementations in detail by reviewing these 3 use cases:Signing in using Single Sign on:
This use case will let us set the landscape of the basic i-name infrastructure; i-brokers, service providers, xri resolution and yadis resolution.
Publishing data from a system:
Giving someone that donates money on-line a signed record of their gift.
This use case demonstrates publishing data from a system. The data is provided to the userso that they can share it with other systems as they see fit . This shows basic XDI syntax and permissioning.
Getting email addresses from a user’s XDI profile:
This case demonstrates how to either use your existing database as an XDI cache or make XDI calls in place of conventional SQL calls.
Date: Monday December 5, 2005
Time: 12 Noon (Bring your own lunch)
Program: 1pm
Venue: ooTao, Training Room, 3rd Floor, 1080 Marina Village Parkway, Alameda, CA 94501
Leader: Andy Dale author of the Tao of XDI and founder of ooTao (Object Oriented Tao)
Please contact Justine Hirsch (justine.hirsch [AT] ootao [dot] com) to register for this event. Places are limited so book early to avoid disappointment.