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Internet Identity Workshop in DC

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The Internet Identity Workshop is coming to the east coast for the first time – September 9-10, 2010 in Washington DC.
The theme for the event is Open Identity for Open Government. You can learn more about the event on the IIW website and register over on this site.

Internet Identity Workshop comes to DC!

Theme: Open Identity for Open Government.

Register Here!

Internet Identity Workshop East (IIW-East) is September 9-10, 2010 in Washington DC  at the Josaphine Buttler Parks Center.  This event immediately follows the Gov 2.0 Summit.
The Internet Identity Workshop has been held semi-annually in California since the Fall of 2005. The 10th IIW was held this past May and had the largest attendance thus far. There have been many requests to have an IIW on the East coast, and now the Open Identity for Open Government Initiative is providing a timely incentive to have one in Washington.
IIWs focus is on “user-centric identity”, addressing the technical and adoption challenge of how people can manage their own identity across the range of websites, services, companies, government agencies and organizations with which they interact. IIW-East will focus mainly on the government adoption of open identity technologies for use by government websites.

Unlike other identity conferences, IIW’s focus on the use of identity management approaches based on open standards that are privacy protecting. IIW is a unique blend of technology and policy discussions where everyone from a diverse range of projects doing the real-work of making this vision happen are able to gather to work intensively for two days. It is the best place to meet and participate with all the key people and projects such as:
  • OpenID
  • IMI Information Cards
  • GSA approved schemas for open identity protocols
  • Personal Data Stores
  • NIH pilot adoption of Open Identity technologies
  • Certification of industry open identity credentials
  • Business models for higher LOA open identity credentials
  • National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace

The event has a unique format – the agenda is created live the day of the event. This allows for the discussion of key issues, projects and a lot of interactive opportunities with key industry leaders.
The event compiles a book of proceedings with the notes that are gathered from the conference. You can find the Book of Proceedings for IIW7, IIW8,  IIW9 & IIW10 here. BTW these FOUR documents are your key to convincing your employer that this event will be valuable. As attendees register we ask about topics they wish to discuss.
Providing identity services between the general public and government websites is a different problem than providing authentication and authorization services within one or a few organizations (enterprise provisioning/termination or federation between two companies or government agencies).
As a community we are exploring these kinds of issues:

Questions Agencies Face:

  • How can open identity technologies enable open government
  • How can agencies leverage identity credentials generated by other organizations
  • How can the government  leverage the efforts of social networking sites that offer user-centric identity credentials
  • What are the advantages to agencies of adopting open identity technologies
  • How can open identity technologies enable your websites to move beyond brochure-ware
  • How can we increase the speed in which government organizations can benefit from the use of open identity approaches
  • How to manage Federated Identity on an ever increasing scale
  • What are the implications of National Strategy for existing policy mandates
  • Should there be integrated political architecture
  • There are five distinct Cyber Security Bills in Congress now – what are the implications

Policy  Considerations:

  • The relationship between FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards) and identity management
  • What are the business cases for agencies to adopt Open Identity Technologies
  • What are the new legal constructs that make this work
  • How to use open identity technologies to preserve privacy while providing personalization
  • GSA standards for the use of open identity technology
  • Data Privacy Issues
  • Personal Data – how is it stored and shared with end users
  • How are these new approaches regulated

Technical Issues:

  • Open identity standards (identity and semantic)
  • What software is available to leverage open identity standards
  • How different standards and technical implementations interoperate
  • How agencies can accept identity credentials generated by other organizations
  • How open identity technologies can enable your website to move beyond brochure ware, without using cookies
  • How to leverage open identity technologies in your technology roadmap
  • How to implement Federal Identity
  • Tecnlogy issues involved in implementing existing Identity Management technology
  • Lessons learned – what are the most effective ways for Federal Agencies to build and employ identity systems

New Industry Developments:

  • Personal Data Stores/Data Banks with our digital footprints recorded
  • What new Identity Management technologies are on the horizon
  • National strategy for trusted identities in Cyberspace

Please join us at the Internet Identity Workshop

To consider all these and more!

It is the best place to meet and participate with all the key people and projects such as:

  • OpenID
  • IMI Information Cards
  • GSA approved schemas for open identity protocols
  • Personal Data Stores
  • NIH pilot adoption of Open Identity technologies
  • Certification of industry open identity credentials
  • Business models for higher LOA open identity credentials
  • National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace

IIWX Internet Identity Workshop 10, Introductory Talk

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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.

Internet Identity Workshop 10 – Introduction to the User-Centric Identity Community

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.

IIW is NOT an advocacy group – sigh “the media”

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Facebook’s Online Identity War quotes me and labels IIW an advocacy group. IT IS AN INDUSTRY FORUM. Douglas MacMillan.
Sorry but I am still learning “how” to talk to reporters. They don’t like to quote me as “the identity woman” and link to my blog.
I “do” run the Identity Workshop with Phil and Doc but that doesn’t make it an “advocacy group”
Identity Commons & IIW have a purpose and principles believing in user/centric identity. The power of individuals to manage and control their own identities online. We don’t “advocate” for them – we create a convening space for people who want to work on this ideal.
Facebook does on some level “agree” with the idea of user-centric identity – Luke Shepard has participated in the community for quite a while & they hired David Recordon. They sponsor IIW.
I am clear that the opening up of previously controlled information with no warning “jives” with my understanding of user-centric control. It was more from my own point of view I was commenting. That is with my “identity woman” hat on… and the values I carry from Planetwork and the ASN… but the press hates that. Uggg. Chris Messina gets to be an “open web advocate”… that is what I do to but just about identity “open Identity advocate” (mmm…) but then that sounds like “just” OpenID and it isn’t just about that one particular protocol. sigh.
I am still wondering – How does one “belong” and have “titles” in a way the media can GROK when one does not have a formal position in a formal organization.
sigh – identity issues.

IIW9 Highlights – IIW10 Reg Open

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I am really pleased to share that the notes for IIW9 are available in PDF form now. All sessions also have a wiki page too.
Heidi Nobantu Saul did an amazing job collecting notes and we managed to get all session notes except a very few on the last day.
Highlights include:

The 10th Internet Identity Workshop is May 18-20.
Registration is Open Now and Extra Early Bird Rates are in effect until January 31.

Fire Fox and Identity in the Browser

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ReadWriteWeb reports this week:

Decrying redirects and iframes, Raskin tells of a brave new world where an in-browser button that defies navigational difficulties allows for something closer to true identity portability than we’ve seen yet:Identity will be one of the defining themes in the next five years of the Web. Nearly every site has a concept of a user account, registration, and identity. Searching for “sign in” on Google yields over 1.8 billion hits. And yet, the browser does nothing to make this experience better save for some basic auto form filling. The browser leaves websites to re-implement identity management, and forces users to learn a new scheme for every site… Your identity is too important to be owned by any one company. Your friends are too important to be owned by any one company.

Finally! They said it!

Comments in reaction to the ReadWriteWeb post highlight Information Cards & CardSpace are not mentioned – I point out in my comment that the work is all connected ant pointed to the IIW conversations about Active Clients attended by all.
Aza open their post with this paragraph:

Identity will be one of the defining themes in the next five years of the Web. Nearly every site has a concept of a user account, registration, and identity. Searching for “sign in” on Google yields over 1.8 billion hits. And yet, the browser does nothing to make this experience better save for some basic auto form filling. The browser leaves websites to re-implement identity management, and forces users to learn a new scheme for every site.

They make these key points following the images they have (you should check the images out)

• Identity is part of where you are, and what you are looking at (Amazon looks different depending on if you are signed in or not). That’s why we put it in the URL Bar.
• For most sites, you’ll probably only have one identity, so login will be a single click or automatic.
• Putting verbs into the navigation bar isn’t new. See Taskfox.
• To increase visibility, webpages should be able to make a Javascript call that opens the login/signup bubble.
• For webpages that want to own the login-process, the account creation simply acts as the ultimate form-fill. For those interested in the evolution of the idea, you can see an early mockup with comments as well as Alex Faaborg’s similiar mockups.

They also make this point…

Chris Messina and others has been advocating for a model which follows the Facebook Connect lead: a single verb, to connect. Once connected, you decide exactly what information to share in an asynchronous manner. Unfortunately this bleeds information — your name is known to all websites which which you connect. We’d like to explore what a connect metaphor in combination with the ability to remain anonymous but connected means.

I agree with the firefox folks. Having a way to do verified anonymity is essential.
“Selective Disclosure” is the name for technologies that do this.
The firefox team should check out Stefan’s U-Prove Technology that may be released shortly by MSFT that acquired it over a year ago –
(seems like Stefan killed his blog when he moved to MSFT..mmm..anyways.)
Firefox folks invite people to get involved here.

Internet Identity Workshop Details + Regular Registration Ends Wednesday

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This is cross posted on the IIW Blog

Regular Registration ENDS NEXT WEDNESDAY – October 28th at Midnight. Prices go up $100 after that.

The Internet Identity Workshop #9 Tuesday – Thursday, November 3-5 in Mountain View, CA Computer History Museum

Please blog/tweet about the conference. The hash tag is #iiw , our twitter handle is @idworkshop

Proposed Topics List is here. We all make the agenda together beginning at 1 on Tuesday and again on Wednesday and Thursday morning. If you want to know more about how to prepare for an unconference check out this piece called “unconferencing” by Kaliya Hamlin (@identitywoman) the facilitator of the workshop.

You can see the specific times of sessions.

Tuesday Morning Opening talks will cover: * The Identity Trust Framework activities – Drummond Reed and Don Thibeau * Data Portability releasing their EULA work * Action Cards – Phil Windley and Paul Trevithick * Discovery etc. – Eran Hammer-Lahav * Activity Strea.ms etc. – * A VRM update * We might cover activity happening in the healthcare sector * We are working on having Vivek Kundra the CIO of the US join us via skype – as yet this is unconfirmed.

They won’t cover – OpenID 101, Information Cards 101 or SAML 101 If you are unfamiliar with these topics we recommend reading these papers/watching these videos. There is a lot of information online covering these topics on the foundations/organizations respective websites.

OpenID – http://openid.net/ OpenID video about it – http://www.youtube.com/

Information Cards – http://informationcard.net/ Video – http://informationcard.net/watch-the-video

SAML – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SecurityAssertionMarkup_Language Video – Ping Identity on SAML 101

All together now – the Venn of Identity The paper – by Drummond and Eve the update – The Zen of Venn

Demo Hour: We still have Demonstration slots available you must sign up ahead of time to Demo. It is Wednesday after lunch short 5min demos will be happening throughout the hour – throughout the room. Please e-mail Kaliya[at]mac.com to get a table and more information about how it will work.

Food: I forgot to ask if there were any special dietary requirements. Please let me know if you have any – this is what we have in store for you.

Tuesday – Burrito Bar, Tied House Wednesday – Indian, Italian Thursday – BBQ Boys

Thank you to our Sponsors:

Without their contributions this conference would not be possible. (we still have sponsorship opportunities available)

<a href=”http://www.internetidentityworkshop.com/sponsors/”> <img src=”http://www.internetidentityworkshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/IIW9Sidebar.jpg”> </a>

About the Notes Taking Procedures: In our effort to document the whole confernece and give all attendees access to all the happenings in sessions we have a notes taking procedure:

If you convene a session it is your responsibility to get a note taker for your session.

The note taker needs to use the NOTE TAKING FORM – found here in digital form (the paper version will be avaliable in each break out space too). When notes are complete, the note taking form must be e-mailed to iiwnotes@gmail.com OR transfered to a USB key at Documentation Center OR if paper notes are taken transcribed by the notes taker on computers provided in Documentation Center

We will also be collecting a more immediate list of results from each session on 11×17 sheets.

We are looking forward to seeing you next Tuesday!

let us know if you have any other questions,

-Kaliya, Phil and Doc

IIW IX is open for business

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Iiw9_4.png

Internet Identity Workshop number 9 is coming up in about 10 weeks. November 3-5 (Tuesday to Thursday) in Mountain View California at the Computer History Museum.

We are excited about all the developments in the industry with protocol evolution in the social web space AND larger and larger scale deployments of open identity technologies including OpenID and Information Cards.

There will be much to talk about at this fall’s event.

Early REGISTRATION is Open! UNTIL SEPTEMBER 16 then prices go up by $50-75

Early Bird Prices are….

  • $274 regular tickets
  • $148 for independents
  • $ 50 for students

We need to get 75 people registered by September 16 to make a final confirmation for our conference space at the Computer History Museum.

Special this year we have the “BIG” ticket for those can expense $998 (but can’t convince marketing to sponsor). This is a GREAT way to support IIW!

IIW is a completely community driven event – we don’t pay anyone for marketing – the community is our marketing.

Please put our LOGO ON our blog our WEBSITE.

Follow IIW on Twitter – @idworkshop

SPONSORSHIP OPPORTUNITIES ARE STILL AVAILABLE!!! Please contact Phil if you are interested in learning more phil@windley.org

JOIN THE COMMUNITY MAILING LIST

THE INVITATION TO IIW!

The Internet Identity Workshop focuses on “user-centric identity” and netizen empowerment on the social web trying to solve the technical challenge of how people can manage their own identity and social activity across the range of websites, services, companies and organizations that they belong to, purchase from and participate with.

This is where everyone from a diverse range of projects doing the real-work of making this vision happen gather and work intensively for three days. It is the best place to meet and participate with all the key people and projects. This is a comprehensive list of the technology communities that are covered.

The event does not have a pre-set agenda instead as people register they are asked what they would like to present about, learn and discuss with peers/industry experts. These are all collected here . The first morning of the conference will be introductory orientation about key projects and technologies in the community. After that the community creates the agenda itself using the Open Space Method. Dinner both Tuesday and Wednesday are a big part of the conference.

Here are links to notes that cover most of the sessions from the last two conferences IIW #8 spring of 2009     IIW #7 fall of 2008

These documents are great resources for convincing your boss of the value of this event.

The heart of the workshop is a practical idealism in working towards the shared vision of a decentralized, user-oriented identity layer for the Internet.

Because the web was built around “pages”, no tools or standards were created to control how the information about you was collected or used. At the Internet Identity Workshop we bring the people creating these tools and standards so people can safely manage their online identity and control their personal data.

It is not about any one technology – rather it is a place to discuss multiple interoperating (and possible competing) projects, standards, and networks for identity, data sharing, and reputation.

As part of Identity Commons, the Internet Identity Workshop creates opportunities for both innovators and competitors. We provide an open forum for both the big guys and the small fry to come together in a safe and balanced space.

There are a wide range of projects in the community:

  • Open conceptual, community, and governance models.
  • Open standards and protocols.
  • Open source projects.
  • Commercial projects.
  • Projects to address social and legal implications of these technologies.
  • Efforts to rethink the business models and opportunities available with these new technologies.

User-centric identity is the ability:

  • To use one’s identifier(s) on more than one site
  • To control who sees what information about you
  • To selectively share presence and profile information
  • To maintain multiple identities and personas in the contexts you wish
  • To aggregate attention, navigation, and purchase history from the sites and communities you frequent
  • To move and share your personal data, relationships, documents, and other publications as you wish

All of the following are active topic areas at each IIW:

  • Improving Existing Legal Constructs Privacy Policies Terms of Service
  • Creating New Legal Constructs – Limited Liability Personas, Identity Rights Agreements
  • Creating New Business Models – Identity Oracle, I-Brokers
  • New Citizenship Perspectives – Activism Community, Event Coordination, Community Identity and Data Sharing

The Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) was founded in the fall of 2005 by Phil Windley, Doc Searls and Kaliya Hamlin. IIW is a working group of Identity Commons The event has been a leading space of innovation and collaboration amongst the diverse community working on user-centric identity.

Web Finger! moving out into world

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I love the Internet Identity Workshop! it is where innovative ideas are hatched, answers to hard problems are vetted and standards consensus emerges. This is just the latest in amazing collaborations that have emerged.

Web Finger was covered on Tech Crunch today with this headline – Google Points At WebFinger. Your Gmail Address Could Soon Be Your ID.

At IIW in May they had a session lead by John Panzer. The notes were not filled out that much but (All the Notes from IIW)   

but there is a white board of their conversation and a link to what google had up.

Chris Messina spliced it together

XRD the discovery protocol is part of how Web Finger works. This spun out of XRI.

Techcrunch didn’t explicitly pick up on the fact that Eran Hammer-Lahev has been a key collaborator and is at Yahoo! (they did link to the mailing list where he is posting). He has been really driving XRD forward lately.

All exciting stuff.

Cultivating Community

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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.

FU – The Monday After, Facebook Usernames and Your Domain on the Web

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Last week it was announced that on on Friday Night at 9pm Pacific Facebook had a name space land rush. Everyone was free to pick for themselves their username that would appear in their URL. facebook.com/username

I actually found this a bit surprising – remember the big debate on the Social Web TV I had with Josh Elman about “real names.” He was against handles completely and felt that the big value facebook brought was “real names”. I argued for handles and the freedom to choose one’s “identity” on the web. I made the point that free society – having the ability freedom to have the option to have and use handles on the web NOT linked to our given/ in real life names. Another thing is that handles help us navigate namespace clash from regular names. Max from MySpace is 8bitkid not some other Max in a sea of Max’s.

I ran into Josh Elman at the Building43 party and we agreed I kinda won the debate with this latest development. It seems that having peoples pages rank higher in google is helped by having readable URL’s.

They of course “strongly encouraged” people to just pick a URL with one’s real name and did so by “suggesting” names that were derivatives of one’s name. You could override this and type in your own name choice (however defaults matter so most people will end up with names similar to their real name – rather then being asked to think up one). They give users an addressable identity.

Max Engel of MySpace became /8BitKid – his handle “everywhere”

David Recordon surprisingly didn’t go with DaveMan692 – his handle most places – he is /DavidRecordon

My friend Jennifer became /dangerangel as she had originally signed up for in Facebook but they disallowed her to have it.

I just became /Kaliya (I am hoping I can get enough fans to claim /identitywoman for that persona)

What is particularly interesting is the layers of identity in Facebook.

With a Facebook URLFacebook has the one’s username is not one’s e-mail address as it is with Google profiles and one also has a common name (or as they say “real name”) that is presented to throughout the system.

Google ironically enough they ask if you want a “contact” me button on your page that does not give away your e-mail address when the profile URL gives away your e-mail address.

Twitter has /usernames AND another display name of your choosing that is changeable (the /usernames are not). However most twitter clients display one or the other. If you are used to seeing the display name and then are on your phone that is only showing @handle /username then you don’t know who is talking.

Facebook usernames is another example Twitter feature adoption by Facebook others being activity streams becoming much more like twitter streams.

I said when I first “got” twitter about 18 months ago – a big part of the value it provided was its namespace. It gave me a cool anchor on the web that allowed communication between me and others via the web.

So how is it going so far? Inside facebook reports that over the weekend 6 million folks – 3% of their userbase gut URLs. 500,000 in the first 15 min, 1,000,000 in the first hour and 3 million in the first 14 hours.

There were several examples of FaceSquating. Mike Pence took Obiefernadez’s name.

Anil Dash has the funniest post ever about the whole thing. Highlight the point that users don’t need facebook URL’s they can just get their own domain name. He repeats this throughout the post about what these services are not telling you:

None of these posts mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.

I completely agree with him – he also misses a key point the usability of facebook is vastly higher then the usability of domain name registration, cpanel management and other things involved in getting ones own personal web presence going. DiSo isn’t hear yet so we can’t link to our friends without linking capability that a facebook provides. I suppose Chi.mp was trying to

He links to a post of his from December 2002 called privacy and identity control.

I own my name. I am the first, and definitive, source of information on me.

One of the biggest benefits of that reality is that I now have control. The information I choose to reveal on my site sets the biggest boundaries for my privacy on the web. Granted, I’ll never have total control. But look at most people, especially novice Internet users, who are concerned with privacy. They’re fighting a losing battle, trying to prevent their personal information from being available on the web at all. If you recognize that it’s going to happen, your best bet is to choose how, when, and where it shows up.

That’s the future. Own your name. Buy the domain name, get yourself linked to, and put up a page. Make it a blank page, if you want. Fill it with disinformation or gibberish. Plug in other random people’s names into Googlism and paste their realities into your own. Or, just reveal the parts of your life that you feel represent you most effectively on the web. Publish things that advance your career or your love life or that document your travels around the world. But if you care about your privacy, and you care about your identity, take the steps to control it now.

In a few years, it won’t be as critical. There will be a reasonably trustworthy system of identity and authorship verification. Finding a person’s words and thoughts across different media and time periods will be relatively easy.

What people don’t quite get is that if they anchor their whole online life around someone else’s domain they are locked in. When I first started paying attention to user-centric identity online this was one of the meta-long term issues that the first identity commons folks (Drummond Reed, Fen Lebalm, Owen Davis, Andrew Nelson, Eugene Kim, Jim Fournier, Marc Le Maitre, Bill Barnhill, Nikolaj Nyholm, etc).

A few of them wrote a paper about it all – THE SOCIAL WEB – Creating an Open Social Network with XDI.

They liked the XRI/i-names architecture because it addressed the URL recycling problem with a layer of abstraction. All i-names also have linked to them a conical identifier – an i-number. This number is never reassigned in the global registry. However one could “sell” one’s i-name (mine is =kaliya) and that new person could use it but it would have a different i-number assigned to it for that person.

This past week at the Online Community Unconference we were talking about the issue of conversation tracking around blog conversations. How an one watch/track the conversation about one’s work if it is cross posted on 10 different sites OR if it is just posted in one place and one is distributing a link through 10 different channels? We never did get to an answer – I chimed in that the web was missing an abstraction layer – that if one could have a canonical identifier for a post that was up in 10 different places this would make it easier to track/see conversations about that post. What we do have now that we didn’t have 3 years ago for helping track conversations across multiple contexts is OpenID at least so you can see if someone commenting in one place is the same as someone commenting in another.

There is an additional layer of abstraction in the XRI architecture that supports several things are key to helping people integrate themselves and information about themselves on thew web.

One is cross referencing – so I could have have two different (URI) addresses for the same information (in the identifier – not just mapped over one another leaving me with one address OR the other) and also have one version of my profile be the one I controlled and a different be a version that appeared in a certain social context.

There is also a concept of much finer grained data addressability and control – so I could have my home address in one place and instead of entering this into each website/services/company portal that I want to have this information – just hand them a link to the canonical copy I manage and then I don’t have to change it everywhere. This is of course where the VRM folks are going with their architectures and services.

We shall see how it all evolves. That is what we do at the Internet Identity Workshop is keeping on working on figuring this all out.

Open Stack & IIW Proceedings for the Holidays :)

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I thought you would all like to know about this event coming up December 19th in San Francisco. Learning about the Open Stack for the Social Web. It will be a great overview of the components of the “open stack” (although some take issue with this name – I think it will do)
5:30 to 5:40 – John McCrea introducing the Open Stack
5:40 to 5:50 – Eran Hammer-Lahav on Discovery
5:50 to 6:00 – Allen Tom on OAuth
6:00 to 6:10 – David Recordon on OpenID (including OpenID + OAuth)
6:10 to 6:20 – Kevin Marks on OpenSocial
6:20 to 6:30 – Joseph Smarr on Portable Contacts
6:30 to 6:40 – Chris Messina on Activity Streams
These components are the alternative to Facebook Connect (or any other proprietary identity silo) LockIN. It is exciting to see all the progress that has been made and in particular the work coming out of this last IIW.
I am very proud of the fact we actually have collected basically all the notes from all the sessions at this IIW. They will be published in a PDF by the end of day today. Here is the link to the wiki with all the notes as well. The PDF will be be linked to off the top of the page.

You know your conference is to cheap when…

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You know your conference is to cheap when other conferences offer you $200 discounts to register EARLY and yours only costs $200.

In case you missed it the Internet Identity Workshop has an announcement up and registration is open. Phil and I implore you to PLEASE register early so we know how many of you are coming.
We subtly softened our language about “user-centric identity” to take into account that there is some concern that this might be going to far in one direction and it may be that the parameters of the relationship in the middle is where the focus needs to be.

The Internet Identity Workshop focuses on what has been called user-centric identity. Basically asking the question how can people manage their own identity across the range of websites, services, companies and organizations that they belong to, purchase from and participate with. IIW is a working meeting for a range of groups focused on the technical, social and legal issues arising with the emergence identity, relationship and social layer of the web.

I think this year Identity as a service will make a strong appearance. Companies like Symplified are doing interesting things that have application in the enterprise market first but could have usefulness on the consumer side maybe sooner then we think.
More from the announcement:
As a community we have been exploring these kinds of questions:

  • How are social networking sites and social media tools applying user-centric identity? (this is the question I am interested in knowing more about. How is it working now that you can actually implement some of this stuff – it is not just big ideas any more)
  • What are the open standards to make it work? (identity and semantic)
  • What are technical implementations of those standards?
  • How do different standards and technical implementations interoperate?
  • What are the new social norms and legal constructs needed to make it work?
  • What tools are needed to make it usably secure for end-users?
  • What are the businesses cases / models that drive all this?

Our event is highly participatory anyone who wants to present can do so. The agenda is made all together on Tuesday morning. We do this unconference style – for those who have not yet been you can read what community leaders have said about the effectiveness of the format.
If you are NEW please come to Monday’s introductory session starting at 1pm. If you have attended before it is worth coming to get the latest updates on where things are.
Yes it is CHEAP – $200 if you are an independant, and $350 if you come from a corporateion. You get all your meals paid for (healthy food – some say the best ever conference food).
If you want to come and you can’t afford it – talk to us – we want you there if you want to be there.
If you are an Identity blogger and have been to IIW PLEASE blog about this one coming up. We also have a blog sidebar logo you an put up.
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PARTY!!! after IIW / before DSS Party hosted by Chi.mp

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So this year after the Internet Identity Workshop there is going to be the Data Sharing Summit – in between is going to be the Chi.mp Happy Hour – in honor of Decentralized User-Centric Identity.
It is FREE (if you RSVP) from 6pm to 8pm Wednesday May 14th at Temptations, 288 Castro Street, Mountain View, CA 94041
You can eat there or move on to other fine venues on Castro Street.
I have to say how personally greatful I am to be working with Tony and his team on this event.
I met Tony about 2 months ago in NYC when he came to the Identity Commons meetup that Ryan Janssen hosted with me at Angel Soft. We talked a lot about the community and the history and the future – Ken Jordan, author of the Augmented Social Network: Building Identity and Trust into the Next Generation Internet (2003 First Monday), was there too. He has been doing a great job blogging about the issues on Own Your Identity and I am excited to introduce him to the whole Identity Commons and Data Sharing Community this week.

IIW and DSS retweeter set up on Twitter: follow IIW6

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I have a ‘retweeter’ for the week of events set up at Group Tweet. My thought is we should just use one for both events – to help information flow between them. (if people really want a different one for both we can do that but lets discuss)
So how does this work.
First get a twitter account.
Then Follow IIW6 (this is because it is the 6th Internet Identity Workshop)
Then IIW6 will follow you back
When you direct message IIW6 it will be rebroadcast out to all the other subscribers to IIW6.
To direct message you simply type “d iiw6 Kim is giving a great talk in room A”
Then IIW6 will say “via @identitywoman Kim is giving a great talk in room A” and everyone who is following IIW6 will hear it.
With this set up we can talk to each other – back channel like.
The tweets that get sent out are currently sent to public.
If you have never tweeted before I think this a great opportunity to try it.
You can just follow one account – even have it come to your phone (because the volume won’t be that high) to do that you have to set device updates from IIW6 to ‘on’ another step after you click follow. It is very unlikely it will go over you total limit for text messaging for the month usually 150 or 200 messages on a standard plan.

IIW Monday is FREE & program announced

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If you are wondering what the Internet Identity Workshop is all about we have a new articulation posted on the main wiki page for our upcoming conference. It goes into the range of topics covered along with the technology and social issues. This is our 6th event and I think it will be a great one.
**** MONDAY IS FREE (beginning at 1PM) ****
We have Monday’s program figured out and Monday afternoon is FREE to anyone who wants to come and check out the emerging field. We will open at 1pm.
We will open with a ‘newbie’ perspective from Ryan Janssen who has been an amazing active reader of the community blogs and writing about it as Dr. Star Cat

Everyone will get a hand out of all the community project one pagers.
Presentations will then follow about five centers of gravity in the community that we see:
The VENN OF IDENTITY
1) OpenID – David Recordon
2) SAML/Liberty Alliance – Paul Madsen
3) i-cards – Pamela Dingle
4) Data sharing/linking – Drummond Reed
5) Vendor Relationship Management Project – Chris Carfi
Between 3:30 and 4:00 we will be all together – considering “what useful things can we do” along with other questions please be there for this if you feel all up to speed on “everything”. We think that the presentations will be informative for those already familiar with the landscape it has moved forward since we last were together – so we encourage you all to get there at 1PM.
We are working on a blog push on Thursday May 1st – blog about it that day- (if you miss that day – blog about it anyways over the weekend)

Newbies 4 Newbies Call Tomorrow

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If user-centric identity, the identity meta-system, identity commons and all this stuff is confusing.
You are wading through all this content on these blogs and wikis and going “AHHH! I just want someone to explain it.”
Well we have the group for you!
Newbies 4 Newbies formed not to be “experts” explaining it to new folks but instead to support new people sharing with each other resources that they found helpful and to challenge the ‘older’ members of the community to better explain things.
The group has a mailing list and is having its 2nd conference call tomorrow 🙂 Newbies are welcome 🙂 Click on their wiki page for details – call number to be posted shortly both there and on the mailing list.

What the Heck is Identity Commons?

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The purpose of Identity Commons is:
The purpose of Identity Commons is to support, facilitate, and promote the creation of an open identity layer for the Internet — one that maximizes control, convenience, and privacy for the individual while encouraging the development of healthy, interoperable communities.

This one sentence jams a lot into it – we tried to do that so the purpose didn’t go on and on – but was clear, broad and inclusive of the range of issues that need to be addressed and balanced. Jamming so much into that one sentence also creates a challenge – it has to be ‘parsed’ quite a bit to get what it all means. I worked with Chris Allen recently to separate out the values within the purpose and our community. This is our initial draft that is still evolving (wordsimthing suggestions are welcome).

We believe in the dignity of human individual in the context of the digital world.
In order to make this true we strive for a balance of factors and valuesas digital systems and tools evolve:

  • Individual control, convenience & privacy
  • Sharing of information when participating in community
  • Support for commercial and non-commercial exchange
  • Interoperability and openness between systems

We work to bring these values into practice by fostering a collaborative a community of individuals, organizations and companies share these values and are working together towards practical technical implementations.
We share a pragmatic idealism.
We work to practice what we preach and have openness and transparency in what we do.

We do know there are a lot of technical social and legal issues that arise and Identity Commons is a space that make it possible to in a non-directive non-hierachical way address them in a collaborative way.
We also have some shared principles mostly concerning how we organize ourselves and work together. Each has a sentence to articulate it further.
1. Self-organization
2. Transparency
3. Inclusion
4. Empowerment
5. Collaboration
6. Openness
7. Dogfooding
What the heck is an “open identity layer” – well we don’t exactly know but we do have a community that has come together some shared understanding and continue to ‘struggle’ with what it means and how it should work. Identity Commons provides a ‘common’ space to work on this shared goal by facilitating dialogue and collaboration.
Kim Cameron introduced the terminology “identity meta-system” and articulated what that might mean. The Laws of Identity were put forward by him along with some additional ideas by other community members.
There is no “decider” or group of deciders or “oversight committee” as part of Identity Commons ‘directing’ the development of the “open identity layer”.
We are a community collaborating together and working to exchange information about our independent but related efforts working towards the vision. The way we do this is via the working group agreement.

  1. Asking each working group to articulate its purpose, principles and practices by filling out a charter – this helps us be clear about how different groups work and what they do/are planning on doing
  2. Stewards review proposed working group charters – ask questions, consider were there are synergies, and see if they are aligned with the purpose and principles
  3. A vote of the stewards council is held
  4. Working Groups agree to report quarterly on their activities to remain active as groups of the organization – this also is our core ‘inter group communication mechanism – so that you don’t have to be on 20+ mailing lists to know what is going on in the community.

More about Stewards:
Each working group has one steward and an alternate for the stewards council.
The stewards are responsible for the things IC holds in common – the brand and its integrity and common assets (like the wiki and bank account). It does not ‘direct things’.
Stewards have (an optional) monthly phone calls and discuss and make decisions on a mailing list (that anyone can join).
More about Working Groups:
There are working groups within Identity Commons that support the community collaborating – the stewards council does not ‘run’ these groups but they serve the community and our efforts together- The Internet Identity Workshop, IC Collaborative Tools, Idnetity Futures, Id Media Review, Identity Gang, Marketing and Evangelism.
Working Groups come in several forms:
They can be an group of people with a passion to address something they feel needs to be addressed to get to the big vision. They want some wiki space and a mailing list to talk about the issues. Examples include Enterprise Positioning, Inclusive Initiatives, Identity Rights Agreements.
They can be an existing project that are part of a larger organization, Higgins is an example of this – they are a project of the Eclipse Foundation.
They can be something that grew out of conversations in the Identity Commons community and found a home within another organization like Project VRM (charter) has as part of the Berkman Center and will likely become its own ‘organization’ independent of Berkman by the end of the year.
They can be completely independent nonprofit organizations with their own boards, governance, bank account etc. examples include XDI.org and OpenID.
Some just get technical stuff done as part of IC like OSIS (doing its 3rd Interop at RSA in a month), and Identity Schemas.
Benefits to being explicitly a part of the IC Community.
clarity about each groups purpose, principles, and practices – so that collaboration is easier.
sharing of information via the collaborative tools and lists, along with the required quarterly reporting,
We “don’t know” what an identity layer looks like but we do know it needs to have certain properties to make it work for people the extensible nature of IC gives people the freedom to start a new group that addresses an aspect of the vision. This is the page on the IC wiki that explains our organizational structure.
We are a community.
We are a community more then “an organization” and joining does not mean subsuming a group identity under IC but rather stating a commitment to a shared vision, common values and commitment to collaboration.
A touch of formalism can help create great clarity of group pratices (governenace), leadership, intention, and focus. Not needed for small groups of 12 people doing one thing- helpful when you scale to the 1000’s of people working on the big vision. IC through its groups structure has 1000’s of people participating helping to innovate the technology and think about the social and legal implications.
We are not about “a solution” or “a blue print” there will be multiple operators and multiple standards – yes like the web there may one day be ‘standard’ that emerges just like TCP/IP did and HTML/HTTPS – however it is way to early to promote or be behind “one” thing, it is not to early to start collaborating and building shared meaning and understanding and interoperability between emerging efforts.
Identity problems in the digital realm are as much about technical issues as they are about the social implications and legal issues. Identity Commons explicitly makes space for the social and legal issues to be deal with in relationship to the technologies as it evolves.
In closing there is a background (shorter) and a history (longer) written about the community as it evolved.

IC and Data Portability

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Here are some question asked in a recent conversation on the dataportability.org lists about IC along with my responses.
Maybe the Identity commons should be trying to set boundaries as being purely about identity?

An “open identity layer” that touches so much and there needs to be a “common space” to nash through the vastness of the problem – to deal with the technical, social and legal issues around people sharing their information in community and business contexts. We have this ultra extensible form and broad purpose to enable this to happen – there is “no committee in charge” no “one” or “company” or “group” is deciding what we “do” – we are a loose conglomeration that shares vision and values. Working independently but connectedly and commited to collaboration. It It is an ‘unconventional’ model that that is working to supposed and connect diverse conversations and technical efforts together.
Can we instead resolve that we promise to incorporate any decisions made by Identity commons as being part of our blueprint?

There are no “decisions made by Identity Commons” read our principles – we are a cluster of working groups that work independently.
Your blueprint (as a side note why there is still ‘one blueprint’ and not ‘blueprints’ plural at the very least or preferably ‘reference implementations’ in the plural form is still a mystery to me) will likely draw on tech stuff groups in IC have been working on for a while. Why not be a part of the ‘commons’ that they are a part of?
My perception of IDCommons is that it’s about Identity, and in your words, interoperable user-centric identity.
Most of the people who have been involved for the past several years got involved to help people have control of their ‘data’ – their identity the informatoin about them is part of what composes their identity. they didn’t get involved to ‘invent’ an identifier layer that didn’t “do” anything
I see DataPortability being about data sharing (in a technical sense)Identity is clearly a very important part of that but I don’t see much at all on IDCommons about data sharing. It’s as though DP has a wider scope of which IDCommons is a major part.
The exceptions to this view are

  • Identity Schemas group
  • Photo Group
  • Data Sharing group

None of which seem to have much activity.
* OpenID has attribute exchange and Discovery in it – all about data sharing.
* Higgins & Bandit and the Pamela project ALL about infrastructure for card based tools that are all about data sharing for people.
* Project VRM all about how to create a new industry model to revolutionaize CRM and put individuals in charge of their data in radical new ways when relating to companies they do business with.
* I-brokers – their job is to stor data about people and have it be trusted.
* IRA – Identity Rights Agreements – all about how we create human understandable terms of service and norms in this area (it is a huge project and has interested folks but really needs a multi hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal work to ‘do it’).
* XRI and XDI two standards with roots in IC all about data sharing that can be applied to both peoples personal data and other forms of data that have nothing to do with people.
* OSIS is the Open Source Identity System and having its 3rd Interop event at RSA (The major security conference) in April with over 200 tests between relying parties, identity providers and (user-agents) card selectors. this group is ‘only’ a working group of IC (it does not have its own independent legal entity/or affiliation with another one as a project). People moving data around is what all this card stuff is about.
So. I am not sure where we have groups that are not in some way focused on this problem area.
DP is just the latest in a long line of initiatives that recognises the same underlying problem but none of the previous initiatives have captured mind share or really got traction.

Our goal is not to ‘capture [public] mind share’ (does the W3C, OASIS or IETF capture public mind share?) our goal is to facilitate the range of technical, social and legal initiatives that all need to happen to get and identity layer of the web – that shares people’s data in privacy protecing, conveninent and under their control. It is a huge problem – with many elements – having a loose community structure (with a slight bit of formalization) is actually working in some way to move this forward.
I think we’d be missing a lot if we scoped DP as a specialization of an “open identity layer”.
What do you think moving peoples personal information arournd – data portability is about. It is about building an ‘identity layer’ of the internet – for people and people’s DATA.
Chris has said a few times the scope of DP is to be narrow for now and focused on solving the data portability issue between mainstream social networks. This seems like something that fits into the purpose quite well.
Yes all data for all things needs to be moved around AND a good deal of data is created by people for people about people and the things the they do – hence the synergy.
Seems like semanitcs – when we wrote this purpose about two years ago this was the best we could do to describe this ‘vision’ it is VERY broad.
If DP wants to go beyond ‘people’ data that needs to move around GREAT – however much of that will be created by organizations and companies (that have identities).
Related Posts: What is Data Portability.org
What the Heck is Identity Commons?

DONE! The IC Working Groups 2007 Q4 Reports and January News

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This past week the Identity Commons Working Groups 2007 Q4 Reports and January News were published. I worked in my catalytic role to get all the Stewards of the 8 groups of IC to turn in their reports. There is also news from many of the soon to be IC working groups.
This is the post from the Identity Commons Blog. It is where you should subscribe to get updates from the different working groups at IC. They will be using it to post announcements and information about what they are up to. We have our next stewards call this Wednesday at 9am PST.

PDF of Identity Commons Working Group 2007 Q4 Report and January News
Introduction:
Identity Commons (IC)is a loosely connected community of Working Groups that are addressing the social, legal and technical issues that arise with the emerging identity layer of the internet. The purpose of Identity Commons is to support, facilitate, and promote the creation of an open identity layer for the Internet — one that maximizes control, convenience, and privacy for the individual while encouraging the development of healthy, interoperable communities.
A wide range of individuals from both large and small companies have been dialoguing and developing tools to make this vision a reality. This past year the community was formalized, forming a nonprofit corporation. Identity Commons has adopted a set of principals to ensure an open, inclusive, and bottoms-up operating structure. Each Working Group has a representative on the Stewards Council. Membership resides in the Working Groups – where the real work is happening. Each quarter Working Groups report on their activities. This was our first quarter of official operation with reporting Q4 2007. There is also news from groups in the process of joining Identity Commons included.
Contents:

Current Working Groups
Community & Events
Identity Gang
Internet Identity Workshop
Technology
OSIS (Open Source Identity System)
OpenID
Identity Schemas
Social Agreements and Policy
Identity Rights Agreements
XRI Org
ID Commons Operations
IC Collaborative Tools
In Process to Join Identity Commons:
Business Application

VRV (Vendor Relationship Management)

Open Source Code Projects for Identity Systems and Data Sharing
Higgins Project
Bandit Project
Pamela Project
Groups related to Standards
SAML Commons
XDI Commons
Newly Formed

Enterprise Positioning
Enterprise Identity Architects
Newbies 4 Newbies
Inclusive Initiatives
Id Futures
Id Media Review
You can find more background information about IC here and a moreindepth history here

Identity Commons Wiki Care and Feeding

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The Identity Commons Wiki has pretty much all been moved over from the old to the new wiki. I did what I think are the last 6 major pages today.
There are a few that could use some attention from the community to improve their content.
EVENTS.
What are the upcoming conferences this spring and summer that cover identity. Feel free to add past events – the ones you spoke at should be here.
THE NEWS ARCHIVE
There are no events in 2007 – which was an exciting year for identity. So if folks would like to contribute the stories they thought were big – just a few people entering one each would do.
REFERENCE WORKS:
It has papers related to concepts, principles and background related to user-centric identity along with Law Policy and Society. Please add papers that you use/know to be references for the field.
Johannes did a great job of pulling the landscape together
The Protocols Technology section needs some information in it (it is blank).
Thanks for taking the time to help out filling in the details – this is what helps outsiders figure out what is going on in this space.
Next week we will have our first Newbies 4 Newbies call. They will need these to be more complete to help develop the Starting Points page to help with orientation.