Identity Woman

Independent Advocate for the Rights and Dignity of our Digital Selves

Identity Commons

Kim Cameron's Panel about Identity @ SD Forum

· · Leave a Comment

This is from the SD Forum on Interoperability January 31, 2006.
Prateek Mishra – Oracle
What is the identity problem?
It is stuck in a few places at employwer, bank and you want to
how does your identity get from your identity provider – the places were you have defined your identity to all these business processes and services.
We want to do this across the internet. There is the protocol piece – we know how to transmit identity from point a to point b this is solved…
Governence models how to transfer identity in trusted ways from point a to point b. Folks like Liberty Alliance have white papers and frameworks for this. This is a non-trivial problem. How you maintain and create governance?
How do you have normal folks sitting at their computers manage their identities in intuitive ways. How do they have a tool
Identity is stuck it wants to be free.
Protocol – Token Representaiton – solved
Governence and Infrastructure – somewhat solved
How does a person leverage these multiple identities?
Kim Cameron – fan of SAML and Liberty
As we move to more interconnected set of systems we need an identity layer. When you have an architectural whole of this magnitude you have a huge number of kludges.
Meta System
Users have no way of predicting how they should work – knowing when they are in danger.
old days fighting over token rings vs. ethernet – we got TCP/IP that encapsulated both.
We need a metasystem (I got a tiny bit distracted here, sorry. So the transcription is not perfect)
Karen Wendel, Identrus
Metasystem – single interface from an identity perspective.
Everyone has a visa card – that folks each having a card for each store. The industry would be stuck without interoperable.
Rules used consistently throughout the world.
VISA would take responsibility for legal, technical and policy issues.
Identrus was owned by the banks. Your identity will be given to you. It takes responsibility around the policy stuff. Legal aspects of your identity – dispute resolution. Liability of relying party who maintains it and lifecycle. We run this network and commonality on global basis.

(from there website) Identrus provides the global standard for identity authentication.
As communications expand and the world shrinks, knowing who’s who in the electronic universe becomes vital.
Identrus offers a full range of technology and services that support every aspect of safe eTransactions.

Rena Mears, Deloitte
Access – from a privacy point of view is different from access from a security point of view
Assertions and Claims are different
Kim Cameron..
Claims are assertions which are in doubt
everything being claimed has to be doubted so we can establish trust.
They considered using Claims but it would have become SCML (scammel)
It is to the benefit to the SAML make things secure in the browser. Shibboleth the hardest thing is home site discovery – infocards visual representation and
pick one of the 5000 higher education institutions…
or pick ‘your’ university identity.
Identrus: This is what we would call an identity provider.
Kim:
SAML is the transport language
SAML is used between a portal and services to the portal.
I propose we have new ways of the user authenticating to the portal.
The systems still exist.
Karen:
What constitutes and identity and the needs for security.
How does language play in this space – there are a lot of different models – identity is not the same as authentication or security.
problem blending identity and security – PKI
you get these people
Kim:
anyone who works with a protocol they get infected by the protocol and their vision blurs and and narrows.
We need more fanatics about protocols
Identrus:
one of the challenges for us as a community – identity does more then authenticate – sign things and create legal contracts – engage in business transactions, incur liability and regulatory transactions.
you can’t look at the papers and not see an inherent relationship between identity and security.
Rena:
Who has stepped up to be the binder of identity to the individual.
Prateek:
there is not such thing as single monlithic identity
there are multiple notions of identity useful for different contexts
Shibolith context higher education
Identrus is a context and a governance model
We like Infocards if we could use it when we get to the line in the spec it says Identity provider discovery – out of band
authentication is out of band for SAML
Karen:
everyone is bound by
the bank that issues the identity to the person
the bank binds to the person – labile to up to 10 million dollars
issued within all the legal requirements
there all these pockets of identity – the level of binding – between issuer and relying party – it does not transfer through the bridge structure.
A lot of the federated model you don’t have that level of binding between the parties.
We will work with the bridges and it is a different element.
Kim:
The government – thinking of itself as the ‘binding’ authority – reasons for relative autonomy.
Belgium a national identity card – but no card readers
One group was the association of mayors – they were now being asked to sign their legal documents with their individual citizen identity – they used to sign their documents with a stamp of their office – we must think of roles.
Kim:
The issue is PRIVACY.
the characteristics that really respects privacy are the characteristics of a system that really is difficult to penetrate.
All of the identity issues – any initiative that takes this forward we should all applaud.

Yes there is Post-Post Modernism

· · 1 Comment

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.

Reflections on the Year

· · Leave a Comment

James had this reflection about the year and it got me thinking about mine.
I dido on the “One weird stressful year”
I started out last year working as an Evangelist for Identity Commons 1.0. It was clear that the money was running out and I was not sure what I was going to do next. I ended up doing some consulting for a PR firm on blogosphere metrics for a certain web photo company. I learned a lot about how attention is reflected very differently in the Blogosphere and Deliciousphere. From that research. It is clear by affiliation and groups will be something worth creating trusted tools to aggregate information. It is all about niche communities. Early on in Delicious land the choices reflected the early adopter geek world. It reflected their choices and interests… how do you maintain those clusters and look at attention.
My next gig was setting up the first official blog ever on Broadway for the musical Little Women. The show closed just as we did our first official blogosphere showing.
In between all that I took on getting Planetwork going and stepping into leadership there as the Network Director. This fall has been fantastic getting monthly networking going in DC, Seattle, Portland (their first planning meeting is tonight) and Boston (we had our first planning meeting last month). We are producing the Green Digital Be-In on Earth Day, Apirl 22nd.
I guess most importantly I got an ‘identity’ this year as Identity Woman. The name just came to me as I was moving away from being officially with Identity Commons. I kept showing up and more often then not I would be the only woman there.
Things continue to evolve in the Identity conversation and it seems like there might be an Identity Commons 2.0 I am already playing a leadership role in making that happen. More details soon.
Combining both these “identities” I just finished the first draft of a white paper on the Civil Society Gateway – how all this identity stuff can really empower citizens to work together.
I have hopes that in the coming year the community that got me started involved with all of this the values based folks who meet in workshops and retreats might ‘get’ networking tools. Integrative Activism will certainly continue on in that vein this year.
A friend of mine with whom I periodically intense conversations talked about the essence of what I do it seems if you wanted to pin it down it would be “facilitation.”
I guess that is what I enjoy most. Bringing folks together and supporting emergent connections forming. I feel good about the coming year. I hope it will be less crazy stressful though. To get a good start on that I will be leaving on ‘silent’ retreat on December 24th and return on January 2nd.

Technorati Tags: , ,

we must be wary of the lawyers

· · Leave a Comment

The lawyers have learnt their lesson now…When the next disruptive communications technology – the next worldwide web – is thought up, the lawyers and the logic of control will be much more evident. That is not a happy thought.

From Slashdot. More from the article it refers to

Why is the web unlikely? Prepare for a moment of geek-speak. For most of us, the web is reached by general­purpose computers that use open protocols – standards and languages that are owned by no one – to communicate with a network (there is no central point from which all data comes) whose mechanisms for transferring data are also open.

Takeaways – Open and Free.

Identity Commons – too point oh?

· · Leave a Comment

I had a good chat with Owen Davis yesterday and we talked about what is going on with Identity Commons . The site has gone quiet while it re-organizes. This will include some existing board members resigning and adding some new ones. A new executive director will be selected too. This is great news.

Web 2.0 round up …

· · Leave a Comment

Web 2.0 was fun. The acoustics sucked (we had to yell to talk to each other at breaks the venue was sooo maxed out). The coolest things were:
Zimbra – The open source collaboration suite.
Transparensee – Discovery Search Engine that sorts results as you move little sliders.
Wink – The social search engine.
zvents – Discover events in your neighborhood.
Attention Trust – You Own: Yourself; Your data; Your attention.

Your Rights: When you give your attention to sites that adhere to the AttentionTrust, these rights are guaranteed.
Property: You own your attention and can store it wherever you wish. You have CONTROL.
Mobility: You can securely move your attention wherever you want whenever you want to. You have the ability to TRANSFER your attention.
Economy: You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return. Your attention has WORTH.
Transparency: You can see exactly how your attention is being used. You can DECIDE who you trust.

Dumbest thing said on the stage:
Bary Diller dismissed the idea that citizens with blogs and video editing software were major threats to the entertainment industry. “There is not that much talent in the world,” Diller said. “There are very few people in very few closets in very few rooms that are really talented and can’t get out.” “People with talent and expertise at making entertainment products are not going to be displaced by 1,800 people coming up with their videos that they think are going to have an appeal.” (this is excerted from Andreas Duss)
To top it off it was Echoed by Vinod Khosla the next day. I guess the big boys don’t really get it – it is like . The cool kids do so…watch out.
Reminds me of this story about denial that I just read in FAST COMPANY (one of my FAVORITE magazines)

Jon Wilkins had just finished telling a room of 100 or so of his peers that their industry is institutionally incapable of giving clients the smartest ideas. How ad agencies and media agencies that decide where ads run are built like factories, focused on one output (and that output is their handcuff). How a new model needs to emerge, one that can provide unbiased advice to marketers.
“You’re saying everything’s changing and it’s not.”
Before Wilkins could respond, one of his clients intercepted the challenge. “I used to kid myself I wasn’t going bald,” said Mark Finney, the clearly hairless head of media for Orange, Europe’s third-largest wireless carrier. “I’d pull my hair forward, I’d cover it over this way, I’d look in the mirror and think, It’s never going to happen to me. Then suddenly I started realizing I looked really stupid. . . . I hate to say it, but Jon’s right and you’re wrong. You’re covering your baldness, and at a certain point, you’re going to look stupid.”

Future Assertion of Note:
Mary Meeker talked about the future of looking for stuff.
Search, Find, and Obtain so that there will be little difference between Marketing, Advertising and Selling.
Her presentation is full of numbers worth checking out.
Acquisitions of Note:
Weblogs Inc was bought by AOL (the deal closed in July just announced though)
Upcoming.org was bought by Yahoo
Alliance of Note:
Sun – Google (comments by Johnathan CEO of Sun)
Rumor of note:
Microsoft buying AOL
Notably Absent:
Discussion of the open source platforms like Drupal that are major parts of Web 2.0 (the people collaborating) and the communities of developers and small businesses around them. I guess cause they are open source and they don’t have thousands to shell out the Tim and John they don’t rate. Hopefully we can do a conference with the cool kids building open source ecologies.

Marc on the Open Web

· · Leave a Comment

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.

O'Reilly's thoughts on Identity in the context of Web 2.0

· · Leave a Comment

I just read through Tim’s five pager on Web 2.0 and found the highlights that relate to Identity.

Meanwhile, startups like Sxip are exploring the potential of federated identity, in quest of a kind of “distributed 1-click” that will provide a seamless Web 2.0 identity subsystem…While the jury’s still out on the success of any particular startup or approach, it’s clear that standards and solutions in these areas, effectively turning certain classes of data into reliable subsystems of the “internet operating system”, will enable the next generation of applications.
A further point must be noted with regard to data, and that is user concerns about privacy and their rights to their own data. In many of the early web applications, copyright is only loosely enforced. For example, Amazon lays claim to any reviews submitted to the site, but in the absence of enforcement, people may repost the same review elsewhere. However, as companies begin to realize that control over data may be their chief source of competitive advantage, we may see heightened attempts at control.
Much as the rise of proprietary software led to the Free Software movement, we expect the rise of proprietary databases to result in a Free Data movement within the next decade. One can see early signs of this countervailing trend in open data projects such as Wikipedia, the Creative Commons, and in software projects like Greasemonkey, which allow users to take control of how data is displayed on their computer.

I hope that Identity Common’s who’s founding principles assert this Freedom loud and clear can lead the way on this.

Users must be treated as co-developers, in a reflection of open source development practices (even if the software in question is unlikely to be released under an open source license.) The open source dictum, “release early and release often” in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, “the perpetual beta,” in which the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis.
Lightweight Programming Models
There are several significant lessons here:
Think syndication, not coordination. Simple web services, like RSS and REST-based web services, are about syndicating data outwards, not controlling what happens when it gets to the other end of the connection. This idea is fundamental to the internet itself, a reflection of what is known as the end-to-end principle.
It’s easy to see how Web 2.0 will also remake the address book. A Web 2.0-style address book would treat the local address book on the PC or phone merely as a cache of the contacts you’ve explicitly asked the system to remember. Meanwhile, a web-based synchronization agent, Gmail-style, would remember every message sent or received, every email address and every phone number used, and build social networking heuristics to decide which ones to offer up as alternatives when an answer wasn’t found in the local cache.

External Brain Restored

· · Leave a Comment

I am back after a bit of an unintended break. While at BarCamp my external brain went into coma [my computer died] someone asked if it had a death by stickers. I don’t think so but judge for yourself – side 1 – side 2. I took it all in karmic stride –
I needed a break and hey it is the end of August.
At BarCamp I got to present about XRI/XDI, I-names, Identity Commons etc.
Durring the break using my OS9iMac I tuned into PlanetIdentity with the aggregator down I can still read all the happening stuff. I found a great post by Doc about metaphors again that shape our view of the web. Identity maps differently in the different metaphors. It seems that the highly social nature is left out where it is a coffee shop that we meet and talk with friends in. This is where identity beings it seems and is perhaps the closest neighbor to the theater performance metaphor. I tune in to the coffee shop community perhaps because. Yesterday (at the time of writing) at the Institute for the Future – Future Commons conversation Howard Reingold performed a micro university 5 min lecture with 10 min of questions/discussion. It was on Coffee-houses and the social networks that emerged from them creating the shape of our modern world through the social innovation that occurred in them. The insurance industry (Loydes of London), scientific societies (The Royal Society), stock exchanges (London) all emerged out of coffee houses of the day.
How can we support people in communities knowing their place better and interacting in more meaningful. Doc highlights the two middle metaphors where free speech and free enterprise happen.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,


Information and Ethics on the Future Salon

· · Leave a Comment

Like I said before I am going through the backlog of snipits in my blog posting tool and finding some cool stuff. Here are two great posts on the Future Salon site that are worth thinking about in terms of identity.
They point to an issue in business week, a book by a nobel prize winner and article series highlighting the fact that information is power particularly when shared amongst people and in community. This power that people have to share their own data/inforamtion to trusted parties has the power to radically shift the economic landscape and one reason I am so excited about projects like Interra (BTW they will be using i-names).
Ethics and discernment will be a key job qualification in the coming era.

…as automation replaces our more rote cognitive and behavioral tasks, workers will transition into an increasingly transparent, highly connected society. In that environment our ability to be fair, responsible, dependable, trustable, and credible (doing what we promise), as well as our ability to empower and help others, as determined by their public feedback, will become the primary propositions differentiating our value to the system.

Technorati Tags:


Passel: identity. remixed.

· · Leave a Comment

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.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Announcing the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW2005)

· · Leave a Comment

There’s been considerable conversation around identity on the Internet, or what some would call grassroots identity. Providing identity services between people, websites, and organizations that may or may not have any kind of formalized relationship is a different problem than providing authentication and authorization services within a single organization. Many have argued that the lack of a credible identity infrastructure will eventually result in the Internet being so overrun with fraud as to make it useless for many interesting uses.
To solve this problem, or pieces of it, companies and individuals have made a variety of architectural and governance proposals. Some of these include:

Myself, Phil Windley, Drummond Reed, and Doc Searls are hosting the Internet Identity Workshop in Berkeley on October 25 and 26th to provide a forum to disucss these and other architectural and governance proposals for Internet-wide identity services and their underlying philosophies. The workshop will comprise a day of presentations on Internet-scale identity architectures followed by a day of structured open space to accommodate the range of topics and issues that will emerge from day one and other issues and identity services that do not fit into the scope of the formal presentations. We’re hoping that adding a little more formality to the conversation will aid in digesting some of the various proposals.
We’re inviting presentations for the first day on the following topics:

  • Problems, issues, politics, and economics or Internet-scale identity systems.
  • Architectures for Internet-scale identity systems
  • Philosophies that drive architectural decisions in these systems (see Kim Cameron’s Laws of Identity for an example of such a philosophy

If you’d like to present on some other topic, drop one of us a line first and we’ll see how it fits in. Prospective presenters will be asked to submit a 250-300 word abstract. We hope to accomodate everyone, but we may end up picking from the abstracts.
I’m excited about this and looking forward to it. I hope we can have a good set of presentations the first day and a solid day of discussion the second. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, I hope to see you there. Please read the full announcement for some other details and register if you’re coming. There is a $75 charge to cover the cost of the venue, administrative expenses, and the cost of snacks and lunch both dats.

Catalyst Round UP

· · Leave a Comment

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

· · Leave a Comment

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.

Language is key

· · Leave a Comment

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

  1. We “move” “content” through a “medium” with a “transport” protocol. So, it’s about shipping.
  2. We “architect,” “design,” “construct” and “build” “sites” with “addresses” and “locations” with “traffic.” So, its about real estate.
  3. We “write” or author” “pages and “files” of “writing that we “browse.” So, its about writing.
  4. 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.