IIW is turning 20 !
That is kind of amazing. So much has evolved in those 10 years.
So many challenges we started out trying to solve are still not solved.
I actually think it would be interesting as we approach this milestone to talk about what has been accomplished and what we think is yet to be accomplished.
I am working on organizing a crowd funding campaign to support completing an anthology that I have outlined and partially pulled together. I will be asking for your support soon. Here is the post on my blog about it.
In the mean time tickets for IIW are up and for sale! You can also order a special T-shirt we are designing especially for the occasion.
Identity Gang
Proactive Development of Shared Language by NSTIC Stakeholders
This is the “punchline section” (in my response it is after what is below…the history of collaboration in the identity community):
Proactive Development of Shared Language by NSTIC Stakeholders
In 2004-5 the Identity Gang (user-centric identity community) was 1/10 the size of the current NSTIC stakeholder community. It took us a year of active grassroots effort to develop enough common language and shared understanding to collaborate. NSTIC doesn’t have 5-10 years to coalesce a community that can collaborate to build the Identity Ecosystem Framework. To succeed, the National Program Office must use processes to bring value and insight while also developing shared language and understanding amongst stakeholders participating.
[Read more…] about Proactive Development of Shared Language by NSTIC Stakeholders
We are not at War
I was the first person Van asked to speak at the Community Leadership Summit West Ignite talks. I was the last person to submit my slides. I have a lot to say about community but I had a hard time figuring out exactly what to say. I knew I wanted to talk about the identity community and our success in working together. Robert Scoble’s quote really got me going and I decided to use the talk to respond to the comment that was catalyzed by his facebook post/tweet “Who is going to win the Identity War of 2010”
This is completely the wrong frame to foster community collaboration.
Internet Identity Workshop Fall – 3 events
The Tenth Internet Identity Workshop in May, 2010 was the largest ever. We have had inquiries from community members on the East Coast of the US and in Europe have been lobbying us to bring the event to their locations. We are happy to confirm that we are going host IIW’s in Washington, DC and London.
WE NEED YOUR HELP! Please take some action if you like IIW and are reading this. IIW is been about the community that attends and participates year round in the activities of groups that use the event to get real work done and move the industry and vision of user-centric identity that works for people forward.
So with these events upcoming Phil, Doc and I need your help in spreading the word to your collegues on the East Coast and in Europe who would enjoy the event.
To help you do this we have several tools and options.
Blog badges for specific events. (These are two of them their are more on the wiki)
For IIW-East September 9-10 in Washington DC
- A Venue! the Josephine Butler Parks Center (a 10min walk from the Columbia Heights Metro)
- an Invitation up online
- Registration is up here and Early Bird ends August 6th.
- an invitation designed to be send via e-mail
- RSVP on Social Networks – LinkedIN, Upcoming, Facebook
For IIW-Europe, October 11 in London we have
- A still being developed invitation up on the IIW site
- Registration is live Early bird ticket sales end August 31
- RSVP on Social Networks: LinkedIN, Upcoming, Facebook
- Twitter List (it will be a bit small until we have more registrations)
For IIW #11 in Mountain View, November 9-11
- We have a simple invitation up online
- Registration is live Super Early bird ticket sales end August 31
If you value IIW and the conversations that happen there please take some initiative and reach out to colleagues to spread the word about these events. Because of the community focus of the events we rely strongly on community word of mouth to let people know about them.
It would be great to have community ideas put forward for the main IIW invitation articulating the current foci of conversations.
Navigating the New Normal: John Seely Brown at Catalyst
I am here this week at Burton Group Catalyst. The conference kicked off with a what was by all accounts good talk from John Seely Brown talking about “the New Normal”.
NishantK: John Seely Brown: many of the things that made us successful in the 20th century will make us unsuccessful in the 21st century
jmatthewg1234: John Seely Brown – Thriving in a world of constant flux
bobblakley: John Seely Brown explains the shift from stores of info to flows of info at http://yfrog.com/5u8r3oj
bobblakley: “The cloud is much more disruptive than any of us have ever thought.” John Seely Brown
bobblakley: “SalesForce disrupted Siebel; now being disrupted itself by SmallBusinessWeb. Things are moving that fast.” John Seely Brown
NishantK: John Seely Brown: Good network is loosely coupled, trusted, not captive & filled w highly specialized nodes < basis of #cloud promise
bobblakley: “Moving to cloud requires factoring policy out of apps & making it a 1st class object.” John Seely Brown
bobblakley “Policies must have version numbers.” JohnSeely Brown
bobblakley: “Control-oriented flows won’t work in federated clouds.” John Seely Brown
jonathansander: Outside-in architectures start with the notion of an ecosystem. John Seely Brown
NishantK: John Seely Brown: Need to move from Inside-out to Outside-in architectures – less control, more trust, less predictable, more agile
bobblakley: Schemas are a hindrance in a world of unpredictability – John Seely Brown
bobblakley: “Data has tremendous inertia; don’t bring data to the computer – bring the computer to the data!” JohnSeely Brown
bobblakley: “Web 3.0 will use social media for context sensitive exception handling.” John Seely Brown
jonathansander: Policies are 1st class objects in enterprise 3.0, but so are exceptions. John Seely Brown
bobblakley: “Two things you don’t want to lose control of are policy and data” John Seely Brown
bobblakley: “The edge pulls the core to it by exploiting cloud services and social media.” John Seely Brown
drummondreed: John Seely Brown at Catalyst: the biggest innovation of the past 100 yrs is not the microprocessor but the Limited Liability Corp
This morning the conference kicked off for real with 5 tracks of amazing content. Those of you who know me, know I really am not a big fan of “regular talking heads conferences.” I often tell folks this is the only talking heads conference I recommend attending. The quality of content and thought put into the analyst presentations and the industry people on stage is of a very quality.
IIWX Internet Identity Workshop 10, Introductory Talk
I gave this talk at the 10th Internet Identity workshop reviewing the shared history, language, understanding and work we have done together over the last 6 years of community life.
Part of this presentation touched on a timeline of events in the community. Those and more are reflected on this timeline that is beginning to be developed here. IIW11 will be November 9-11 in Mountain View, CA The first ever IIW outside the Bay Area will be happening September 9-10 in Washington DC following the Gov 2.0 Summit with the theme Open Identity for Open Government. The first IIW in Europe will be happening in London likely October 9-10 (dates still to be confirmed) prior to RSA Europe. If you would like to know about when the next IIWs have registration open please join this announce list. TheIdentity Gang is the community mailing list where conversations are ongoing about identity. You can follow modest updates about IIW on twitter via our handle – @idworkshop You can see IIW 10 attendees on our registration page.
Cultivating Community
Communities don’t usually “just happen” there is idea, or vision that attracts people, and there are community organizer(s) or catalysts that proactively seek out others who share a vision and help bring a community together.
Growing community, cultivating community, nurturing community, weaving community, building community, creating community – all slightly different metaphors describing this process that happens when people make the effort to create space (an environment) for people to meet, inviting people into the space and encouraging conversations that help connections and foster relatedness.
Community is what unfolds when people come together voluntarily, learn about one another, begin to care about one another, and start to do things together. In doing things together that are successful, trust develops and people begin to work and act together IN community, doing progressively more difficult things, becoming strong and more resilient.
Thanks to Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point we know about Connectors, Mavens, and Salespeople, social archetypes that play different roles, each with their own value in helping information flow, networks form and communities emerge.
It was great to have him articulate this i finally had a label for my own activity/passion – I have become a maven of a few things throughout the years. user-centric digital identity was a subject I really got into in 2003-4. I read everything I could about the subject as I began to meet some of the people thinking about it. I became passionate about the topic and applied my connector skills and started meeting finding people who were interested in the subject. Those who didn’t know about the subject I sold them on the idea :). I am not by nature a sales person about “anything” but only those things I believe in.
One can also see a community as the evolution and maturing of a network, that is the relationships between people. When beginning the links might be very weak, but in time as the potential community members get to know each other and take action together and the ties strengthen; they become a stronger and more resilient “real” community. A paper that was very influential in my understanding was Building Smart Communities through Network Weaving by Valdis Krebs and June Holley that I read in 2003 (along with every popular science book on network science out then: Linked, Sync, Six Degrees, Emergence, Nexus)
This paper investigates building sustainable communities through improving their connectivity – internally and externally – using network ties to create economic opportunities. Improved connectivity is created through an iterative process of knowing the network and knitting the network.
Knowing the network and knitting the network have been foundational in my practice of community weaving. I regularly meet with people in the community and help them get connected to others who’s work is related to their goals. Two examples first RSA as often happens those new to the community “knock on my door” and ask to meet for lunch or coffee to share what they are doing and learn more about who they should connect to in the community. Mike wanted to meet with me he to share about his new company Gluu that does inter-domain identity. It was great to learn what he was up to and also share papers/doc’s/projects relevant to his work and people he should meet. Yesterday I followed up with someone I invited to/and attended IIW. I spent 2.5 hours talking with Joe Johnston who attended about his efforts to bring interoperable identity (OpenID and other things) to Pachamama Alliance and other organizations with similar missions.
In terms of knowing and knitting networks between different communities/standards bodies/consortia/projects I wrote a post about Community Diplomats and Community Diplomacy last year thinking about different community-connecting roles and how if they are named they can be seen better and foster inter-group collaboration and communication.
Another essential but often un-named aspect/milestone of community development is communities development is shared language and then shared understanding. Shared Language is a prerequisite to collaboration enabling what were different perspectives and world views to sync, and then out of that it is much easier to work together. Eugene articulates three elements needed to create shared language:
- Share individual contexts
- Encourage namespace clash
- Leave enough time and space to work things out
An example of shared language that was developed in the community was the identity gang lexicon that Paul and others worked on in 2004-2005 so that when discussing different identity technologies there was at least a common language to talk about them.
Another example of the evolution of the communities shared understanding grew out of Johannes original presentation at IIW2006 with the identity triangle with three pillars – user-controlled, company controlled and then microsoft controled. He did an updated it almost a year later explaining of the community language and understanding had evolved. This starting point was moved forward by Eve Maler creating the Venn of Identity and became an IEEE paper written by her and Drummond Reed. Johannes has continued to be a wholistic thinker about the landscape and in 2008 he articulated an onion to think about which identity technologies are applicable where.
Space and Spaciousness for community to form is a key part of what the Internet Identity Workshops have been about about. We have never “set the agenda” there but instead allow anyone attending to post a session idea. We encouraged dialogue with space rather then having an agenda.
We have an amazingly rich community fabric of working relationships that is both resilient and delicate.
Identity Gang Meeting in NYC
I am headed to NYC to facilitate the Online Community Unconference East. While there I thought it would make sense to have a meetup about Identity Commons and all the stuff happening in the community.
Ryan Jenssen reached out to me this week about community developments and contributing. We chatted back and forth and he agreed to have the event at his offices – at Angel Soft. I think we should have drinks starting at 6:15 dinner at 7 and presentation(s) at 7:30 for 1/2 an hour then lots of mingling.
Identity Gang – Social for Identity Commons
Feb 19th at 6:15 – dinner at 7:00 $10 fee.
Please RSVP on Upcoming or e-mail me if you don’t want to do that.
Should be a great opportunity to meet other NYers involved in the community and ask all the questions you want about the community efforts, OpenID, Higgins, OSIS, Bandit, Pamela Project.
Identity Gang Dinner at RSA
I am heading to RSA this year to cover the show for DIDW. Last year was my first dip into all out ‘security land.’ I was glad to hang out with Bob and Pam who helped me understand things there. It occurred to me that it might be fun to have an Identity Gang Dinner one night of the show. This will be both for folks on the list and those at RSA who might be interested in getting to know what we are up to.
Identity Gang now a group in Second Life
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.
Technorati Tags: community, Identitycommons, idmashup06, Identitygang
Identity Gang meeting Catalyst
We had a great Identity Gang meeting at 7am yesturday morning at Burton Group Catalyst. Paul put forward doing a Lexicon 2.0 to define some new things. He got some volunteers to help with that and is looking for more if you are interested.
Paul and I shared the news about Identity Commons “2.0” moving forward in forming a nonprofit structure. The purpose is to support the many working groups in the community having a common wiki and other infrastructure.
Reputation Gang mentioned at OCC
For all the folks at the Online Community Camp here is the information about the Reputaiton gang (sorry some how I can’t get onto the closed wiki to share there).
Meng Wong is the lead instigator….
- We’re forming a Reputation Working Group under the Identity Commons umbrella.
- A wiki and mailing list for the working group have been established; you are invited to get involved.
- We are aiming to build in reputation capabilities in time for a September “release”.
- There will be a BoF / WG meeting at Berkman sometime June 19-21.
NEXT STEPS
The next phone meeting will be on June 6, probably at 11am PDT as usual unless anyone would prefer a different time.
REPUTATION WORKING GROUP
Drummond has created the page…
…which is listed on the page…
…which is linked from theIdentity Commons wiki home page at…
The mailing list for the Working Group is called “identity-reputation”, and is being hosted at mailchannels.com; if you ever run into Ken Simpson, say hi and thanks.
Technorati Tags: Collaboration, community, Identitycommons, occ2006, Reputation, ReputationGang, usability
We "don't really like the format"…then don't use it
So, I am here today at OpenCMS. Boris opens a session that he is leading on GeoMapping. He says flat out…”you know I really don’t like this format where we are at the front of the room and you are out there but we all have ideas to contribute”. It is very frustrating for me to hear this because I advocated that the organizers of this conference including Boris use Open Space as the format as soon as I learned about the conference at the end of November (when it was announced). Both myself and Eugene offered to do the facilitation…a month out they had no sessions outlined and would have to do a tone of work to lay out the program.
Now we all sit in rooms 1/2 here, 1/2 doing e-mail – and there would be SO MUCH good stuff happening if the organizers had chosen the Open Space path. As it is things are so-so. Hopefully next time process can be more open and allow for in the moment.
Yes there is Post-Post Modernism
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.
Marc on the Open Web
Marc Canter’s AlwaysOn article finally is out. Breaking the Web Wide Open!
For decades, “walled gardens” of proprietary standards and content have been the strategy of dominant players in mainframe computer software, wireless telecommunications services, and the World Wide Web—it was their successful lock-in strategy of keeping their customers theirs. But like it or not, those walls are tumbling down. Open web standards are being adopted so widely, with such value and impact, that the web giants—Amazon, AOL, eBay, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo—are facing the difficult decision of opening up to what they don’t control.
Identity is the first topic covered and he does a great job summarizing:
Right now, you don’t really control your own online identity. At the core of just about every online piece of software is a membership system. Some systems allow you to browse a site anonymously—but unless you register with the site you can’t do things like search for an article, post a comment, buy something, or review it. The problem is that each and every site has its own membership system. So you constantly have to register with new systems, which cannot share data—even you’d want them to. By establishing a “single sign-on” standard, disparate sites can allow users to freely move from site to site, and let them control the movement of their personal profile data, as well as any other data they’ve created.
Identity 2.0 is all about users controlling their own profile data and becoming their own agents. This way the users themselves, rather than other intermediaries, will profit from their ID info. Once developers start offering single sign-on to their users, and users have trusted places to store their data—which respect the limits and provide access controls over that data, users will be able to access personalized services which will understand and use their personal data.
The Initiatives:
Right now, Identity 2.0 is under construction through various efforts from Microsoft (the “InfoCard” component built into the Vista operating system and its “Identity Metasystem”), Sxip Identity, Identity Commons, Liberty Alliance, LID (NetMesh’s Lightweight ID), and SixApart’s OpenID.

More Movers and Shakers:
Identity Commons and Kaliya Hamlin, Sxip Identity and Dick Hardt, the Identity Gang and Doc Searls, Microsoft’s Kim Cameron, Craig Burton, Phil Windley, and Brad Fitzpatrick, to name a few.
Passel: identity. remixed.
DizzyD presented on Passel and The Identity Gang is in the HOUSE! Johanes, Doc, Phil, Mary and Mary – wow three identity women.
He also didn’t really approach it right he didn’t get all the different systems and how they worked and we were all in the audience correcting him. It really highlighted the need for the workshop we are hosting in October.
Here is the summary:
How do I as user my identity on the web?
The ‘story that started it all’
Wife’s machine got Trojan. I had to change all passwords everywhere.
What is Identity?!
Identity is just another class of information we manage.
It’s a second-order problem. When I get on the net I get on it to do Identity Management other tasks.
What is Identity [Italicized] ?
Depends on the setting
Bottom line two fundamental types
third party vouch for and self asserted
His summary of the other stuff..
What are the options:
Passport
All others are not inherently evil.
everyone is throwing protocols against the wall and seeing which ones stick.
who do you trust to host you identity?
SAML
SAML/Liberty
trust relatinoship between two entities on your behalf
“asserting” used a lot in this world….and I will use it a lot
Standards are well documented and widely deployed. Lots of infrastructure required for trust relationships. Conditionals and trust relationships not viable from an open source stand point. Took a lot of time for a second order problem.
SXIP
Identity is locked into who the identity provider. You can change home sites. not locked in. Run on own machine. Powerful for users with centralized for user to move.
LID
Send information back and forth and urls based.
OpenID
No dynamic scripting needed. You have your identity URL tell via meta tag where identity server is. enter URL – blog URL. LiveJournal do you allow it to authenticate?
Can’t i-names do this?
He asserted wrongly that there was not reputation (global services launch will embed reputation in the messaging/contact system.
For Internet-scale Identity needs
- Aggregate IDentity
- Decentralized and open
- Divers programming Language/environments
- Interoperable implementations
- Bootstrap off existing trust models
PASSEL
Gives you more control over data
Aggregates your identity via user-centric three-piece architechure
implemntations already started Perl, PHP, Java and C#
Pluggable trust models.
Generalized model for proving any DNS-based identifier
Trust Model
- how you prove the signer
- person x
- Moving identity information proving that a
- protocol how move around
- plug in how you trust information
PIECES:
Agent (principle’s computer)
- aggregates into portfolio
- public private key and fingerprint
- natively if not
- Zip file on key – use on different locations
Signer (site that makes assertions)
- signer issues token with for example 4 hour life span
- agent must retrieve new token from dizzyd.com
Target (relying party)
- how does the
- retrieval of public key.
Catalyst Round UP
First of all thanks to Cordance, Opinity and ooTao who supported me in representing them and the whole ecology of folks around Identity Commons. It was a great week with lots of fruitful networking.
Jamie you are the calmest conference organizer I have ever met. Your staff was together and very helpful. Thanks!
Here are the roundup highlights:
Identity Management Market Trends – guitar introduction by Mike Neuenschwander.
Every move of your mouse you make
You’ll get a browser cookie for pete’s sake
Every username you fake, every federated claim you stake
They’ll be watching you
Every night and day
Every online game you play
Everything you say in IM, e-mail, VoIp or some other way
They’ll be watching you
Jamie Lewis kicked of the final afternoon with a keynote on user-centric Identity summed up by Dave Kearns with these talking points
*Heady mix of optimists, pessimists, idealists, cynics
*Agendas, governments, commercial interests could subvert the process
*Indicators of the constant tensions virtualization, digital ID create
*The tug of war will continue, and we all have a stake in the outcome
*Demonstrates the relativistic nature of identity, need for
polycentrism
Bob Blakley talked about his Axiom’s of Identity – they were quite though provoking and a great addition to the Identity Gang/Workshop conversation.
Dick gave a new and improved lessig style presentation on Identity 2.0 / User Centric Identity.
These two both belong to the “mac” community and gave their presentation on them. I got a lot of comments about my decorated Mac. It is nothing compared to Mary’s though.
Identity Workshop on stage. It was great to get a name and face for more of the Identity folks this included Stefan Brands of ID Corner and Scott Blackmer. Who I know was there but didn’t meet was David Kerns.
Strangest Job title: Ryan from Sxip – Sales Engineer (huh?)
Best Hospitality Suite themes matching the company:
- Elementalwith their Ice Carved Bar and Earth and Fire graphics on the wall.
- BridgeStream does role based enterprise Identity Management. So they had had Impro Theater (IT) Shakespeare provided by Theater Sports LA (Michelle, Brianand Floyd) where they each played improvised “roles.” They were kind enough to do an improvised sonnet about Identity Woman (I was really sad I didn’t have a tape recorder :() They also handed out world beach balls for the ‘globe theater.’
Talked to Scott Mace a bit on the first hospitality suite evening about podcasting. It is something Identity Woman might start doing.
Phil Windley, Doc Searls and myself worked out more details regarding the Independent Identity Workshop we are pulling together for the fall.
The Spiritual element of what identity is – the unnameable quality was honored with two different Lau Tzu quotes.
Sailing San Diego Bay with Mary Rundle was the closing highlight.
Thanks to all for a great conference! I am looking forward to coming back next year.
Reputation System for Web 2.0
Jamie Lewis is giving a great talk here at his conference on User-Centrism Meets Polycentrism: Creating Identity Infrastructure for the Internet. One of the things that he mentioned was Identity Commons and my representation of that ecology here at the conference.
He also highlighted the fact that reputation systems have a role to play. I have been working as the Blogosphere Advisor to a start up working on OPEN REPUTATION SERVICES – Opinity. They have a blog too.
One of my new friends in the industry who is a Service Integrator (SI) working on massive enterprise integration projects thought that the talk likely went over the majority of the audience’s head.
Catalyst: Phils coverage
Phil Windley has some great posts covering the Identity Gang meeting on Tuesday afternoon.
Language is key
Listening and watching Doc’s slide show at Syndicate. It is great. One of the challenges he highlights is “Language” as a challenge in describing the new new media…
Cognitive Linguistics 101
we talk about things in the terms of other things
The REAL Matrix is the set of concepts we use to make sense of the world. We are not conscious of them. But they do our thinking and talking for us.
The Real Matrix is metaphors we talk about everything in terms of other things. We literally borrow whole vocabularies. Unconsiously.
Every Metaphor is a box of borrowed words – Concepts that frame our understanding.
Time is Money – we waste it save it spend it invest it lose it and set it aside
Life is Travel – Birth is arrival. Death is departure. Choices are crossroads and careers are paths.
What do we understand the NET in terms of …
Define broadcasting as transporting content. Not as speech.
Broadcast moves content through media. Speech happens in place.
There’s a fight going on between metaphors on the Net and the Web
- We “move” “content” through a “medium” with a “transport” protocol. So, it’s about shipping.
- We “architect,” “design,” “construct” and “build” “sites” with “addresses” and “locations” with “traffic.” So, its about real estate.
- We “write” or author” “pages and “files” of “writing that we “browse.” So, its about writing.
- We “perform” for an “audience” that has an “experience.” So it’s about theater.
The FCC does not currently view the net as a place. It sees it as a broadcasting and communications infrastructure that they should regulate. See this post…
Speech informs. It is not about delivering content. The difference is critical – information is a commodity – it is derived from the verb to inform. Which is derived from the verb to form. Meaning that we actually form each other. We are changed by what we learn from each other. Authority is the right we give each other to form and shape what we know. Much of what happens on the net is sharing and improving ideas. This is how syndication happens and how new standards and practices grow in Blogging, podcasting, tags, identity and much more…
IDENTITY GANG is highlighted as an example of the snowball that can emerge out of conversations and how snowballs form.
Doc shows us the reason internet radio was killed – government regulation. This is the kind of government regulation that drives CATO and company crazy…I am beginning to see the reason they are anti-regulation – highly complex, requires teams of lawyers to discern and ‘follow’ correctly.
How do we use language in the identity space? How can be be more conscious of the language we are choosing to use? I hope that next ID Gang and at Catalyst we can have a few deep conversations on this. It also relates to policy usability. The terms we use to describe identity sharing policies must use appropriate language (metaphor) to describe what is going on.