The authors of the NSTIC document went to great lengths to get input form a wide range of stakeholders. The draft document they released last summer provided an opportunity to give feedback, giving an excellent starting point to bring people with very different core motivations and concerns together. The choice to name the big picture vision an Identity Ecosystem informs the choice of processes and structures appropriate to govern it.
User-Centric Community Success
In 2005-6 the Identity Gang /user-centric identity community was one tenth the size of the current NSTIC stakeholder community. It took us a year of active grassroots effort to develop the common language and shared understanding necessary to collaborate. NSTIC doesn’t have 5-10 years to coalesce a community that can collaborate to build the Identity Ecosystem Framework. To make the vision real, people who are from these different points of perspectives must become more aligned, to have a shared understanding.
How to Create Shared Language and Understanding
The NPO should continue using its convening power (both online and face-to-face) to keep fostering the dialogues necessary to have shared language understanding emerge.  That will create a momentum to create the conditions for high-performance collaboration amongst the stakeholder community.
 
Using methods such as Value Network Mapping and Polarity Mapping will increase the shared language and understanding. With just a few staff, the NPO could host many focused meetings with stakeholders around the country and at industry events throughout the fall.  The community of NSTIC stakeholders will be able to organize a thriving ecosystem because there will actually be shared language, understanding amongst NSTIC stakeholders by January.
Help Stakeholders Learn About and Find One Another
The starting point for this could be the list that came out of the MIT workshop and the Wikipedia book. There should be a simple standard set of information on each organization, including how they see themselves as a stakeholder in NSTIC, what they hope to contribute to it, what they are most concerned about, and what they want to collaborate with other stakeholders on. There might be a matchmaking role that the NSTIC NPO could play, proactively introducing stakeholders to one another so that potentially synergistic collaboration is enabled.
Supporting the stakeholder groups in learning more about one another is very important. One way to do that would be via a 2-3x weekly podcast, perhaps increasing it to a frequency sufficient to interview all known stakeholders.
All major conferences within the stokehold industries should be listed on a searchable calendar.  This will help with cross-pollination, which is essential right now for the proactive development of shared language and understanding.
There should also be a way for people who are actively working to collaborate to find one another both online and off.  NSTIC can use the conference calendar to encourage/enable “meet-ups” among stakeholders.
Socialization of NSTIC in IT professional communities is essential. These people need to understand it when it becomes time to socialize NSTIC with the public.  They also can be a pool of not-directly-involved stakeholders to be tapped to participate in things like the Community Insight Council.
Measure Shared Understanding
When a diverse group of NSTIC stakeholders are passing the squirm test (page 15), then real collaboration is possible and it will make sense to “spin up” a steering group because there will be broad alignment within the group.
Foster Accountability Frameworks
Trust is absolutely essential in the Identity Ecosystem. People must trust that the information they share will be handled with care, respect and human dignity. This is achieved by having real accountability in the system around the user’s rights. When the system is functioning well and accountability frameworks are followed, then overall systems behavior of the Identity Ecosystem will be trustworthy.
Public Legitimacy is Key to Success
The processes around ecosystem development must also be very open to engender public trust. The NPO must work with industry to develop a strategy for public engagement and socialization.
Release Control to a Diverse Stakeholder Group
If the NPO rushes to set up a steering group before this kind of shared understanding is present in the private sector, large companies who host or provide the identifiers on digital networks used by millions of people (in the US and around the world) will lead it in their own way, primarily as a vendor driven trade association. They have no inherent incentive to create inclusive space, or incorporate key aspects of the strategy like maintaining civil liberties that seem difficult or expensive.
The NPO needs to lead in creating the space for:

• The private sector with the many different industries
• Nonprofit and advocacy groups
• Small and medium sized businesses
• Most importantly, the average citizen

Once the the stakeholders are collaborating using the shared language and understanding,  the government can “let go” and just be a participant in evolving the Identity Ecosystem.
 
This post is from pages 51-54 of Kaliya’s NSTIC Governance NOI Response – please see this page for the overview and links to the rest of the posts. Here is a link to the PDF.
This is the section before: The Importance of Public Legitimacy
This is the section after: Missing Questions about NSTIC Governance

The importance of regular people feeling heard and that the processes are broad and inclusive should not be underestimated. A trip to Marin last month made this particularly apparent to me. I stopped at a “groovy organic grocery store” to pick up a snack for the long ride I had ahead of me. Outside were two women with a table of stickers and literature about various progressive causes and issues. They had a sign on a chair saying “STOP THE SMART GRID”. I was interested what their concerns were. Why did they want to stop it.  They were concerned about many things, but in particular the data collection from houses, the use of the data, who had the ability to see the data and what it would be used for.
[Read more…] about The Importance of Public Legitimacy for NSTIC

Stakeholder Engagement with Dialogue and Deliberation
Co-Authored with Tom Attlee, Director of the Co-Intelligence Institute 
The NSTIC governance NOI highlights the government’s role should be in an ongoing way to protect people’s interests. I invited Tom Attlee to co-author this section with me because of his 10+ years of research into a whole range of inclusive citizen engagement processes. The Tao of Democracy is his book that looks at how the best of them effectively synthesize the people’s perspective on whether their interests are being protected well enough.
I worked with Tom Attlee in 2006 to explore which emerging electronic collaborative tools (blogs, wikis, online forums etc.) could be used to augment and complement proven deliberative processes that were developed before the web existed (chart in Appendix 6). They have proven very effective, but also expensive and labor intensive. Based on this work with Tom, I wrote a chapter in the Personal Democracy Forum book Rebooting America on how these methods could be used to gain democratic insight that is deeper then from voting or polling. (text Appendix 5)
[Read more…] about Insight for Governance

Knowing what groups are in an ecosystem is a key first step but information sharing and coordination between organizations and communities who are participants in an ecosystem is key to making it real.

I have heard it said more than once by those seeking to develop tools and systems for this emerging identity ecosystem, that they wish there was just “one place” where it all could be found, where all the technology would be developed.  Given the vast number of organizations, this is never going to be the case, but what we can facilitate is much more robust information sharing systems across technical standards development organizations and communities focused on solving key challenges for a real ecosystem. The NOI asks this question:
1.2. Are there broad, multi-sector examples of governance structures that match the scale of the steering group? If so, what makes them successful or unsuccessful? What challenges do they face?
Identity Commons was originally founded in 2001 by Owen Davis and Andrew Nelson to foster a user-centric identity layer of the web that the people “owned”. (They founded the organization partially in response to the formation of Liberty Alliance which was developing “open standards” for identity, but from a large enterprise perspective rather then a grassroots people’s perspective. They drew inspiration from Dee Hook who grew the the Visa network using innovative organization principles.  They were active in the Planetwork Link Tank discussions (See Appendix 1) that lead to the writing of the ASN paper – an excerpt of this is in Appendix 2.)
In 2007 the communities gathered at the Internet Identity Workshop retained the purpose and principles of Identity Commons but transitioned to become a 501(c)6 organization linking and connecting efforts across a range of different communities and organizations.  Groups working on issues touching on user-centric identity did not have to leave their respective standards body or academic institution to join. Totally independent organizations could also join and groups that had not yet formed as their own organization or subsection of another organization could also join.
[Read more…] about Effective Information Sharing for NSTIC Success

The Scope of People
The vision of NSTIC touches all sectors of US society and extends beyond the US because of the international nature of cyberspace. The protocological (from  Alexander Galloway’s Protocol: “The limits of a protocological system and the limits of possibility within that system are synonymous.”) landscape (the range of options enabled by the protocol stack choice) and policy frameworks must be very broad to meet the needs of US citizens and global netizens. Protocol is political because it shapes what is possible in the network (Appendix 11 goes into greater detail).
The number of individual stakeholders for systems of identity online stretches to everyone who uses network systems, and with there now being five billion phones on the planet, that is fast approaching every person on the planet.  The diversity of the world population in terms of life experience is huge (see Appendix 3: People Diversity) . The vast majority of people are not privileged in one or more aspects of life and the freedom to participate in cyberspace with anonymous and psuedonymous identifiers that enable them to transcend or set aside “real world identity” is a key freedom that must be maintained even as more systems-level accountability is developed (To understand these issues please see Appendixes 8: Anti-pseudonym bingo  9: On Refusing to Tell You My Name  and 10: Who is Harmed by a “Real Names” Policy?)
Organizational Stakeholders
I have compiled a list of types of stakeholder types in Appendix 3 representing various interests and points of view in society that are essential to include early on.
[Read more…] about Who are the NSTIC Stakeholders?

Accurate Assumptions in the NOI

An assumption that the NSTIC governance NOI gets right is that all relevant and affected parties (see note) must be involved or at least represented in the emergence and ongoing governance of an Identity Ecosystem.
“Representation of all stakeholders is a difficult but essential task when stakeholders are as numerous and diverse as those in the Identity Ecosystem.”
It accurately names the challenge that comes with the number of parties involved. With this vastness, it can become overwhelming to think of systems and processes that will be effective and inclusive on this scale. I have articulated in Appendix 3 a list of many different types of stakeholder groups representing a diverse array of interests.
 

Limiting Assumptions in the NOI

Given the need to meet the broad and potentially conflicting criteria to be successful, there are two assumptions embedded within the governance NOI that could limit the ability to find solutions that meet these criteria.
[Read more…] about Questions of Governance for NSTIC

Section Co-Authored with Verna Allee, ValueNet Works
Living systems require exchanges with the environment in order to continually renew themselves. These exchanges are of two basic types: matter and energy and (or) cognitive exchanges that express the intelligence of the system.
From a living systems perspective, the molecular level of business economic activity also is the exchange. In traditional business thinking we have thought of economic exchanges only in terms of goods, services, and revenue – the “value chain” transactions. One can think of resources and money as roughly equivalent to the living systems exchanges of energy and matter in living systems.
In addition, as living networks, communities, companies and business webs engage in more than material exchanges –  they also engage in cognitive exchanges. Sustainable business success depends on exchanges of information, knowledge sharing, and open cognitive pathways that allow good decision making. These exchanges not only have value, but are essential for the success of the enterprise, so they must also be considered as economic exchanges.

The Identity Ecosystem, as a human techno-societal system, operates as an ecosystem that has many roles. Between these roles value flows that is both tangible and intangible (things that are recognized but not easily quantified) deliverables.
The value network modeling approach would model this ecosystem as a value network of roles and interactions that are involved in specific system-level outcomes. Roles can be played by organizations or individuals. In value network modeling, specific deliverables between roles are defined as a way of describing the creation and dissemination of value, and to understand how the innovative exploitation of technology and knowledge take place. When the interaction between the different players works well – new, valuable knowledge is generated which is quickly put to practical use. This creates the foundation for innovations and attracts investments.
Any Value Network ecosystem analysis typically addresses three levels of assessment:

• The roles, products, services and knowledge – including data flows – that work within the value network.
• The enabling technologies that support role execution and deliverables.
• The conditions, enablers, and constraints that influence the ecosystem

It is a proven method for mapping diverse industry network ecosystems with decades of practice and application. It provides a visual model and analytical structure as foundation for defining the emerging identity ecosystem and exploring possible scenarios and policy models. It is a dynamic approach to business modeling that scales from shop floor to industry ecosystems.Before sharing how I think this process can be used as part of speeding up the time it takes to make the NSTIC vision real, I want to share an example from where I applied this process to build shared understanding between two very different professions developing a map of the traditional industry and look at how the whole system shifted when the future was envisioned together.
[Read more…] about Value Network Mapping and Analysis for NSTIC Stakeholders

Polarity Management:

Section co-authored with Barry Johnson and Jake Johnson

Polarities

Natural systems thrive when polarities are in dynamic balance – breathing in and out is a polarity humans leverage moment to moment. At the same time, we must attend to more than our Inhaling and Exhaling. We must attend to where the oxygen comes from and where the carbon dioxide goes. Paying attention to polarities within a part of the system is important to sustain life and, it is not enough. The part must also pay attention to the other parts and the whole for its own survival.With any polarity, it is always in the long-term interest of each pole to take care of both poles.

The Part and Whole polarity is available to be leveraged at every level of system. The individual cell in an organ; an organ in an organism; or, an organism in a larger community. We are talking about the development an Identity Ecosystem as a human techno-social systems ecosystem where polarities need to be leveraged. It seems appropriate as a way to gain insight and agreed upon signs of systems health to identify key polarities with stakeholders and monitor how well they are being leveraged over time. This ongoing assessment allows for informed self-correction as part of the dynamic balancing of the polarities in response to changing circumstances.

Polarities in the Strategy

The NSTIC Document clearly articulated many inherent tensions – polarities that exist when considering the formation of an identity ecosystem. This expression of polarities was one reason it was so well received by such a broad range of stakeholders. These stakeholders reflect different points of view relative to some key polarities. Those with perspectives that are on opposite ends of a polarity could see their point of view reflected in the outline of the broad vision. To make a ecosystem function the vision must be grounded and the tensions leveraged in service of each stakeholder group and the whole ecosystem.
[Read more…] about Ecosystem Maps – Present, Evolving, Future: Applied to NSTIC