• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
Identity Woman

Identity Woman

Independent Advocate for the Rights and Dignity of our Digital Selves

  • About
  • IETF Research
  • She’s Geeky: AI Edition
  • Weekly SSI Newsletter
  • Blog
  • Media Coverage
  • Contact
  • Show Search
Hide Search

Publications

July Planetwork FOCUS on DIGITAL IDENTITY TOOLS

Kaliya Young · July 21, 2005 · Leave a Comment

July Planetwork FOCUS on DIGITAL IDENTITY TOOLS

Thursady, July 28th doors at 6, program at 7
CIIS, Namaste Hall,3rd Floor
1453 Mission St. San Francisco (2 blocks from Civic Center BART)

With my emerging persona as Identity Woman curated this line up that provides a great opportunity to learn more about some of the latest tools for next generation digital identity.
Light Weight Identity – LID
Johannes Ernst NetMesh Inc. .
Light-Weight Identity(tm)– LID(tm)– a new and very simple digital identity protocol that puts users in control of their own digital identities, without reliance on a centralized party and without approval from an “identity provider”.
OpenID
Brad Fitzpatrick Six Apart, Ltd.
OpenID, a decentralized identity system, but one that’s actually decentralized and doesn’t entirely crumble if one company turns evil or goes out of business. An OpenID identity is just a URL.
Sun Single Sign On
Pat Patterson Sun Microsystems
Sun is announcing the intention to open source web single sign-on. This project, called Open Web Single Sign-On, or OpenSSO, gives developers access to the source code to these basic identity services allows them to focus on innovations that solve more urgent problems, such as securely connecting partner networks, ensuring user privacy, and proving compliance.
Opinity, Inc
Ted Cho
Opinity provides open reputation for end users. It is a young start up offering free online reputation management related services so that individuals can authenticate, aggregate, and mobilize their website (eBay, Amazon, etc.) reputations. Opinity also offers reputation management tools so that individuals can monitor, build, and work to enhance their own reputation going forward. Individuals can also review other individuals at the Opinity website.
_______
Planetwork has been hosting monthly networking forums in the Bay Area for the last 3 years. We are a unique network sitting at the nexus of technology use for social and environmental good. To support the monthly forums we invite voluntary donations (in a basket on the food table).
If you would like to join our mailing list to get more information about upcoming events please go to this page and get a planetwork i-name and then set your mail preferences.

Catalyst Round UP

Kaliya Young · July 19, 2005 · 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.

Catalyst: Logic of Identity – Bob Blakley Chief Scientist IBM

Kaliya Young · July 15, 2005 · Leave a Comment

This is a summary of Bob Blakley’s talk at Burton Catalyst:
Opening – Sermon on Laws

Laws of Planetary Motion
Kim’s Laws what happens to Identity if you make stupid or subtle mistakes
Newtons Law – gravity
Why things happen
Introduction – Looking Back Digital Signatures
A while back we decided we needed non-repudiation and did digital signatures by issuing certificates.
We forgot to figure out why do signatures work in the real world.
So, we got how they worked wrong in the technical world.
Having signatures not work is bad looking forward having privacy not work is bad.
Body of Talk
Definition:
Identity is a collection of attributes by which a person or thing is generally recognized or known
Identity Relativity
The Identity of X according to Y: The set of attributes believed by Y to be true of X.
Axiom: Utility
An identity attribute has value if and only if knowing that attribute reduces risk for some party
Reducing one party’s risk often creates risks for other parties.
Consequence: Identification is Power
Identity allocates risk.The ability to create or eliminate a risk for another confers power over the other.
Axiom: Contention
Because identity claims allocate risks, they will be disputed.
Identity Attributes

  • Commercial Interest – Convenience
  • Government Interest – Security
  • Individual interest – Privacy

Definition
Privacy: is the ability to lie about yourself and get away with it.
Axiom: Subjectivity
People disagree about one anothers identity attributes
In general, there’s now easy way to tell who’s right and who’s wrong
Axiom: Temporality
The name that can be named is not enduring and unchanging name. All identity attributes change over time.

  • Prince -> symbol
  • Michael Jackson Black -> Plastified

Axiom: Obscurity
Identity attributes can be

  • what you know – you can lie
  • what you have – loose / leave
  • what you are – alter disguise

Axiom: Publicity
Identity attributes cannot be secret
By definition attributes aren’t observable can’t be used to use attributes
Axiom: Contextually
Identity is inherently subject to effect of scale.
Brandon Mayfield – guy who did not blow up trains
His finger print matched one at Madrid Bombing (it was not an accurate assertion)
Large databases -> not completely reliable
To scale identity information one needs to collect — more information
Consequence: Powerlessness
Identity is in they eye of the beholder – subjectivity.

  • You can’t control what other people think or say about you.
  • You can’t even know who knows what about you.
  • Can control what you tell people but not what people find out

Consequence: Privacy Erosion
Scale requires distinguishing between lots of individuals which requires lots of information.
In a sufficiently large population the commonly agreed to be public attributes will not distinguishing individuals well enough.
So information about sensitive attributes will be collected.
In the UK they are look at putting in scanners (QinetiQ) while entering the subway to detect knives but what about creep in the use of other things identifying tatoos?
People push back against government identification.

Consequence: Due Process
Because identity is subjective, contextually, contention and obscurity and temporality.
IDENTIFICATION REQUIRES DUE PROCESS
But due process undermines the business case for identity. Due process requires transparency. Transparency reveals how identity attributes are collected and synthesized to make judgment. Collection and Synthesis are the only sources of completive value.
They do it because they like costumer intimacy.
Supply and Demand mismatch between favorable and unfavorable information.
Favorable information is easy to get.
The subject is happy to give it to you and the subject is happy to help you authenticate it. Therefore the supply is large and the value is low. But it’s worse: Demand is also low! Because favorable information is less likely to reduce another party’s risk. Especially the case when the other party has lots of potential customers.
The business case fore identity service provider infringes privacy.
The business of identity service providers is risk reduction withholding adverse information decrease the value of business.
Collecting more adverse information makes more.
Identity and Privacy are Incompatible.
Adverse information has positive identity value but negative privacy value.
Favorable information has zero identity value and zero privacy value.
Fable about MARIA
Recent guatemalan immigration
she has AIDS and she doesn’t want anyone to know. The health insurance company wants to know this information because it is a $180,000 not to know this.

Catalyst: SSO Simple Secure and Open – Dick on Identity .20

Kaliya Young · July 15, 2005 · Leave a Comment

Dick – had a 580 slide deck done Lessig Style
This is a summary of his talk:
We found out about Dick’s Identity
We learned a about what Identity is
What I say about me
What other say about me (others trust this)
So,
identity=reputaiton
What others say about you
We learned about Identity Transactions:
Verbal in person (with visual cues)
Talk on phone (loss of visual cues)
Job Application (fill out form)
We learned about data verification using drivers licenses in the real world and how the process reduces Identity Friction.
Identity Transactions are Asymmetrical
There is separation of the acquisition and presentation of credential
The credential is reusable
Trust is social
What is digital identity?

Identity 1.0 Today

Today it is the hassel of filling out the same information again and again.
Basically today authentication is that you get to prove you are an entry in a directory entry. single authority on one credential – not portable – in silo.
Verified digital Identity is not what you give a site today.
e-bay -/-> Craigslist
We have walled gardens
Identity 2.0 is where the user can move it to any site.

Simple and open has a history of winning in new standards look at:

  • networking
  • e-mail
  • web – html

WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE?
Identity Credential exchange is transparent transaction that is scalable.
WHO WILL DRIVE THIS?
users? – to many user names and passwords

won’t pay – little influence

enterprise? – partners, contracts, agents

but risky to lead… can’t get there
Identity 1.5

e-government?

maybe

but localized

Banks?

motivated to solve
theoretical trust relationship

Identity Ecosystem will emerge where

users are loosely coupled
share user identity

We are in a new era

Webservices – Flickr, Mappr, SalesForce

Web 2.0 will drive identity 2.0

It will happen on the edge of the Internet (not the edge of the enterprise).

XRI/XDI no web-service apps

SXIP

name/value pairs
DIGS XML

The goal is to mimic photo ID
With Sxip Network

SXIP 1.0 has had a few tire kickers

SXORE Blog comment spam solution

SXIP 2.0 support web services
SXIP ACCESS
SSO – Simple Secure and Open

Jamie Lewis –
Q: So will this go into a STANDARDS PROCESS?
A: We are working on it. We want to get it very close to right then put it into standards body. I like IETF. Our goal is to be open

Spam vs. Ritual Gift Exchange?

Kaliya Young · July 15, 2005 · Leave a Comment

So one of the things the folks building the i-name services will be building in with global launch is reputation services provided by Opinity (http://www.opinity.com) for messaging (e-mail, IM, phone calls etc.). The goal is to build in feedback to prevent bad behavior.
One of the instigators of the Berkeley Breakfast Cabal Ben Gross is publishing a paper on E-mail as Ritual Gift Exchange. It seems that there is an interesting use case to consider around reputation and messaging. There is a difference between forwarding a quirky e-mail or amusing link to friends and network colleagues.

Forwarding a quirky email or an amusing link or video attachment to colleagues may seem innocent enough, but it is the modern equivalent of ritual gift exchange and carries with it similar social implications, say US researchers.
Email forwarding is a familiar part of modern email communications, and has spawned many an internet phenomenon, the Star Wars kid, the Numa Numa dance, and Oolong the rabbitto name just a few.
Benjamin Gross at the University of Illinois, US, and colleagues studied email forwarding behaviour by conducting informal interviews among email users. He says forwarding emails plays a vital role in constructing and maintaining modern social ties, despite the phenomenon receiving scant attention from social scientists.

Update on Ben. he has re-branded his messaging work as identity management and is having success interviewing with ‘big’ internet companies for a job.

Catalyst: Government Adoption of Federated Identity

Kaliya Young · July 15, 2005 · Leave a Comment

This is drawn from David Temoshok’s Talk. He is the Director of Identity Policy and Management GSA Office of Government Policy
Homeland security directive 12
“Policy for Common Identification Standard For Federal Employees and Contractors” – August 2004
HSPD 12 Requirements
1. Secure and reliable forms of personal identification that are:

  • Based on sound criteria to verify an individual employee’s identity
  • Strongly resistant to fraud, tampering, counterfeiting, and terrorist exploitation
  • Rapidly verified electronically
  • Issued only by providers whose reliability has been established by an official accreditation process

2. Applicable to all government organizations and contractors except National Security Systems
3. Used for access to federally-controlled facilities and logical access to federally-controlled information systems
4. Flexible in selecting appropriate security level – includes graduated criteria from least secure to most secure
5. Implemented in a manner that protects citizens’ privacy
Expanding Electronic Government
Needing Common Authentication Services for

  • 280 million Citizens
  • Millions of Businesses
  • Thousands of Government Entities
  • 10+ Million Federal Civilian and Military Personnel

You can learn more on the GSA website – http://www.gsa.gov/aces

Documents for the Undocumented

Kaliya Young · July 15, 2005 · Leave a Comment

This week the cover of Business week is Embracing Illegals. The frame is about how businesses see the 11 million+ ‘illegal immigrants’ as a great market opportunity. To function economically in western capitalism you need identity documents to be part of the ‘representation system‘ that enables trusted value generation and exchange.
It dives into detail about how ‘undocumented immigrants’ get documents to basically function as normal US residents.

Guided by friends and family, the couple soon discovered how to navigate the increasingly above-ground world of illegal residency. At the local Mexican consulate, the Valenzuelas each signed up for an identification card known as a matrí­cula consular, for which more than half the applicants are undocumented immigrants, according to the Pew Hispanic center, a Washington think tank. Scores of financial institutions now accept it for bank accounts, credit cards, and car loans. Next, they applied to the Internal Revenue Service for individual tax identification numbers (ITINS), allowing them to pay taxes like any U.S. citizen — and thereby to eventually get a home mortgage.

The corporate Establishment’s new hunger for the undocumenteds’ business could have far-reaching implications for America’s stance on immigration policy, which remains unresolved. Corporations are helping, essentially, to bring a huge chunk of the underground economy into the mainstream.


The political implications are less clear-cut. Further integration of illegals into the U.S. could help President George W. Bush in his uphill struggle over the past two years to launch a guest worker program. His plan would provide a path to amnesty and full legalization for many unauthorized residents. Companies are taking a position similar to the President’s, in effect saying: There’s no point in pretending that millions of people aren’t here, so let’s find ways to deal with them.

It quickly became apparent. Largely via word of mouth in Hispanic neighborhoods, Wells Fargo has opened 525,000 matrícula accounts, which now represent 6% of the bank’s total. It opens 800 new accounts a day across the 23 states in which it does business.
The success of the matrí­cula has encouraged the expansion of other financial products, such as home mortgages, using the ITIN. Created for people such as foreigners with U.S. investments who aren’t eligible for a Social Security number but still may owe U.S. income taxes, the agency issued 900,000 ITINs last year and a total of 8 million since 1996. In Chicago, Second Federal Savings has 620 ITIN loans worth $90 million.

Spaces for Identity

Kaliya Young · July 12, 2005 · Leave a Comment

This was from the Future Salon:
Outer Space (the world around us: science, the natural and built environment, universal systems theory)

Human Space (the human world: our bodies, behavior, minds, human systems theory)

Inner Space (the world below: energy, small tech, computer “bodies”, inner systems theory)

Cyber Space (the virtual world: computer “behavior”, computer “minds”, cyber systems theory)

Hyper Space (the world beyond: new paradigms, phase transitions, hyperphysics, hyper systems theory)
Relationships are the crossing of boundaries between things.
This happens within our selves and between others.
Maintaining right relationship and boundaries between these is what helps energy flow well.

Cato: Radical Evolution – Joel Garreau Pt 1

Kaliya Young · July 12, 2005 · Leave a Comment

So this a reprint… it was on my old blog.
To clarify for those of you confused my comments are indented and in italics. I never did get to publishing part two either. Hopefully this week.
I heard this talk on June 17 at the Cato Institute / The Economist Luncheon LIberty, Technology and Prosperity in San Francisco by Joel Garneau author of Radical Evolution.
Joel’s introduction was given by The Economist SF corespondent.
He has five hats the most interesting of those seemed to be a TROLL as in the norse mythological figure who hangs out in the woods and looks after the forest.
He is editor of the Washington Post Style section. Is a scenario planner at the Global Business Network. He also has a consulting firm the Garneau group – with him and his best sources. He also dabbles in Academia.
He has authored three books – The

Nine Nations of North America, Edge City – life on the new frontier and the topic of today’s talk Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies and what it means to be human.

Joel Garneau

We are at turning point in human history because of the fundamental changes in what it means to be human in the next 10-20-30 years. The change in the technologies we are working on today is that they are not focused outward on – fire, cloths,
They are focused inward on us – Modifying our minds, memory, metabolism our kids and what it means to be human.
These changes in science have significant political implications. They are changing VC’s have to look at the world.

When I heard this I mentally noted the oddity of it being the next statment. It sort of implied that there was a way in which their decisions had a profound effect on the future – and perhaps they do but should they have this big a power to shape it – how do we discuss and discern about these issues that affect the whole of society?

Their will be changes in cultures and values on our watch in real time. The future is being driven by the curve of accelerated change. How many people have heard of Moores Law – about 1/2 of the audience raised their hands. The data point on this is that normally only 10% of the audience does. We have had 29 doublings of computing since 1959 – that is 40,000,000 times.
This curve did not suddenly start out with the chip. We are in a third sort of evolution of what it means to be human. Darwin and chimps it took 8,000 years to get reading and writing.

Technosis is a great book to understand ‘writing’ as a technology that profoundly shaped culture.

To give perspective rail roads changed everything they touched and the number of miles of rail road miles was only 14 times.
In 1800 we started the industrial age an example of this curve is that in 1903 we had the first flight and 66 years later we were on the moon.
These changes are exponential and change all of society. This curve that we are riding – I don’t see where it levels off.
The limitations are – Quantum Mechanics – The Marketplace – Human ingenuity (he sees no limits to these three)
Finally our willingness to shape culture and values. I am interested in human relationship and love and lies.
WE ARE IN A TIME OF RADICAL EVOLUTION
We are charging the shape of what it is to be human.
Fleet of technology – affect how mind, memory and metabolism works.
I spent a year with DARPA Spent Year with DARPA. They see the week link in the war fighting machine as us – humans themselves. Lets meet the first telekinetic monkey who can move objects through her thoughts.
We hook her on computer games moving a cursor with a joyce stick.
Drill hole in head near motor quartex and put in a mesh of extremely fine Wires that connect with neurons.
See the patterns in the mind when operating the joyce stick
Disconnect the joyce stick.
Just use mind to move the cursor
Hook up robot arm that moves with cursor movements.
WHY????
The defense reason that F22 is difficult to control with joyce stick. If you could control with mind <-> machine connenction. Feeding information into skull real time…blur line between made and born. That is the official reason we are doing this. The real reason is the guy who heads the lab has a daughter with ceribal palsy who can’t walk on her own and what if she could control machines with her thoughts that moved he legs? This is a dramatic change in what it means to be human.
The Berry Bonds – steroid controversy – is the tip of the iceberg in terms of what does it mean to be enhanced? – what are the social implications? Should he have an asterix next to his name because he is not the same type of human being as those who’s records he broke?
There will be people who are delighted to adopt these advances.
There will be NATURALS who are like todays vegetarians
The REST – for reasons of geography or economics are not enhanced and will envy and despise those who are. THIS HAS POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES.
What is driving this is GRIN – Genetics, Robotics, Information and Nanotechnology.
To be continued…

E-mail and Identity on Opening Move

Kaliya Young · July 11, 2005 · Leave a Comment

Scott Mace has a great interview on Opening Move with Scott Chaise.
I would recommend it to understand the current state of ‘trusted’ e-mail and open standards as they come out.

Finally, the war on spam is shifting to controlling outbound email traffic. This has profound implications for Internet service providers and for their customers. Zombie spambot attacks are being met with responses including blacklisting of users and entire ISPs. At Inbox-IT 2005 in San Jose, Scott Mace spoke with Scott Chasin, CTO of MX Logic, Inc. about efforts from Silicon Valley and Washington D.C. to control the spambots.
How can adoption rates be increased for SPF, Sender ID and DomainKeys? What role will the FTC’s recently-released best practices recommendations for outbound email play? What are Port 25 blocking, subscriber reputation filtering, and acceptable use policies? What is the symbiotic relationship between service providers and the enterprise? How are enterprises liable for the spambot traffic they send out? What’s the growing distinction between message submission vs. message transfer? What’s the role of the IETF’s RFC 2476? What is the challenge and opportunity that identity management poses for the messaging industry? Is SMTP broken? What are malicious opt-out attacks?

Presence and Continuous Partial Attention

Kaliya Young · July 11, 2005 · Leave a Comment

So this talk at SuperNova got a lot of buzz. I think it worth thinking about more in the context of identity because one of the things we do with identity is assert presence information. We also use multiple identities when CPAing – e-mail, IM handle, login on a website, IRC handle. What are we paying attention to, how are we paying attention and perhaps how can that divided attention be re-aggregated in a meaningful way and integrated.

Planet 2.0

Kaliya Young · July 7, 2005 · Leave a Comment

I just found this link to Planet 2.0. Thought you all might like to know about it.

Phil's Book coming out…

Kaliya Young · July 5, 2005 · Leave a Comment

Phil’s book Digital Identity is coming out on August ONE. Exciting. He says we can advance order it on Amazon.

Identity and Gaming

Kaliya Young · July 5, 2005 · Leave a Comment

To prepare to talk with Susan Crawford I thought I would scan her three year old blog for any menitons of Identity. It turns out that Susan has done some extensive thought about identity and in particular in the context of online gaming. She has a link to a paper – Who’s in Charge of Who I am?: Identity and the Law Online. Here are some good quotes…

Online identities are emergent. Identity is by definition a group project, something created by the context in which the identified operates.
Online walled gardens will be come more prevalent, as concerns about security, viruses, spam and the unknown increase, as valuable content is made accessible only to those who have been permissioned to see it, and as hardware and software systems made available to the masses increasingly taken on “trusted” aspects. Online games are precursors of these future more serious, walled garden online worlds. Key characteristics of both games and walled worlds are limited access, clear boundaries, rules, roles/players, and feedback mechanisms that create reputation. … These characteristics of games make them ideal laboratories for experimentation with rulesets.

This is a great mention of the word – rulesets. I have been thinking a lot about them ever since I read Thomas Barnett’s book – The Pentagon’s New Map. How we as a society and how institutions that govern us determine what the ruleset’s are is important to think about. With the complexifying world we live in – robust, legitimate and fair systems to create good rulesets are needed. This is particularly true in the online space that is really built by and for us. I hope that all the effort that has gone into creating the Identity Commons structure can be just such a place.
Back to Susan…

Who owns identity? who owns reputation? From the intermediary’s perspective, software creates rules that control what social context can be moved elsewhere. Your identity is “really” a database entry, and the intermediary can argue that your identity is their intellectual property, not yours. You may attach great importance to it, but this identity (and its reputation) will not as a practical matter survive outside the world in which it was formed. Walled world designers have incentives to raise switching costs and capture all the vale of this reputation. In other words, controllers of online worlds are gods. But users may defect from environments and attempt to constrain them in how persistent their reputations and identities are. The difficult task for developers/intermediaries is how much freedom to give their users. This takes us from the realm of risks to the realm of opportunities.
AS real work becomes a more common online activity, identity created in connection with groups will be more and more meaningful.
Human nature will always tend toward group-ness.

  • What would be made visisble? The fact that someone’s identity has been taken away, and the reasons why? Or speech-related actions of the intermediary that have an impact on identity (but are less then “disappearing” someone?)
  • What about reputation? Is it right that a user must leave her reputation behind when she leaves a particular online world? Is “reputation portability” possible? Or is reputation so context-dependent that the online world should be permitted to own it? And what does the online world own exactly? A group-created construct?
  • Is this entire problem avoided by staying out of “walled gardens” and maintaining our own domains? Will this be possible, as online worlds become more and more attractive, and as hardware and software increasingly intertwine?

In the end, it boils down to the fact that the best government is the one that you can trust, which will be the one you know personally: the people close to you in your virtual community, who are held accountable precisely because of community ties. Your best government is going to be each other, because the man behind the curtain isn’t going to know any more than you know him.
Conculusion:
We are still in the early stages of the first two steps dealing with any technology: fear and opportunism. Enlightenment is not far away. I want to suggest that we skip quickly through the fear, linger on the opportunism, and move on to human betterment. This social benefit may come (as so many things do) from playfulness. Games have a great deal to teach us about how we establish and maintain identity. Now we need to consider who is in charge of these identities. It may be, in the end, that we are.
We need to forge a direct link between how we live and work online (especially within walled gardens) and how we structure control over online resources. If the new mode of work online is collaborative peer-production of resources, who will own a shared online space of identities? This ownership may have to be collective. The fundamental problem that is yet to be address is that while reputations and identities are group projects, legal ownership of collectively-created intangible identities currently appears to reside (by default) in online intermediaries. We may need to make some noise about this and ensure a better fit. Perhaps the game should belong to the players.

She raises some interesting questions for us to think about. I think looking at the governance and how to actualize that – this is what the distributed governance form of Identity Commons is designed to do. I didn’t really realize that she was involved with XNSORG several years back. She really liked you all and mentioned Bill Washburn and Drummond Reed by name.
While talking with her about identity and her paper she mentioned her connection to the State of Play conferences. The third one is coming up this fall and is entightled Social Revolution. Two panels look very relevant:

  • Collective Action in the Metaverse: Groups, Community and Power
  • Identity in the Metaverse: On-Line Identity in Virtual Worlds

It is the day after Web 2.0 but might be worth the trip 🙂

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Page 1
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Page 6
  • Page 7
  • Page 8

     Copyright © 2026 Identity Woman  evelurie.com/web design/develop     

  • Terms of Use
  • Privacy Policy
  • Accessibility
  • Sitemap
  • Contact