Context for my response to the NSTIC Governance NOI
Table of Contents to Blog Posts of My Response
My Complete Response in PDF form Kaliya-NSTIC-NOI
Introductory Letter of the Response.
Context for my NSTIC NOI response
I surprised myself when writing my response to the NSTIC (National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace) Governance NOI (Notice of Inquiry). I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to say because the questions seemed like they were way ahead of where they should be interms of where things were. I decided to begin by sharing important Context, Frames and Terms that were important before getting to the Questions of Governance and what should be done now.
I began with the word Ecosystem – what it meant and that a system was at the heart of this strategy not something simple or easily actionable.
I touched on the history of the Identity Community and how much conversation and intensive dialogue happened amongst that early community to get to a place where collaboration was natural and “easy”. A huge amount of effort went into developing shared language and understanding then and this is needed once again. The range of self identified stakeholders for NSTIC is quite large (the range of not self identified stakeholders it could be said is everyone on the planet or at least all those with a digital connection (via phone or interent).
I put forward two different methods/tools/processes that could be used to form shared language and understanding across this stakeholder community Polarity Management and Value Network Mapping.
I suggest that the governance structure proposed a “steering group” actually have a mandate to regularly listen to and act on the recommendations of the system that are generated via 3 different well established dialogic processes (Creative Insight Council, World Cafe and Open Space Technology [What we use at IIW]. I then answer the NOI questions referencing the ideas above.
I am going to be posting the whole of my Response in a series of posts and linking them all from there.
I began with one earlier last week which is focused on “trust” both as an emergent property of the overall system AND as the current name of technology and policy/legal frameworks for identity creation.
Links to NSTIC Response Posts:
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Reflection
Companies in the Personal Data Ecosystem Space
Update: The Personal Data Ecosystem Startup Circle is full of amazing companies.
Today at the Round Table on Do Not Track people were asking me what all the startups in the space are. For expedience a lot of the descriptions are drawn from the companies own websites. We will work on keeping this updated and write better descriptions in the coming week.
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National! Identity! Cyberspace!: Why we shouldn't freak out about NSTIC.
This is cross posted on my Fast Company Expert Blog with the same title.
I was very skeptical when I first learned government officials were poking around the identity community to learn from us and work with us. Over the last two and a half years, I have witnessed dozens of dedicated government officials work with the various communities focused on digital identity to really make sure they get it right. Based on what I heard in the announcements Friday at Stanford by Secretary of Commerce Locke and White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt to put the Program Office in support of NSTIC (National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace) within the Department of Commerce. I am optimistic about their efforts and frustrated by the lack of depth and insight displayed in the news cycle with headlines that focus on a few choice phrases to raise hackles about this initiative, like this from CBS News: Obama Eyeing Internet ID for Americans.
I was listening to the announcement with a knowledgeable ear, having spent the last seven years of my life focused on user-centric digital identity.
Our main conference Internet Identity Workshop held every 6 months since the fall of 2005 has for a logo the identity dog: an allusion to the famous New Yorker cartoon On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog. To me, this symbolizes the two big threads of our work: 1) maintaining the freedom to be who you want to be on the internet AND 2) having the freedom and ability to share verified information about yourself when you do want to. I believe the intentions of NSTIC align with both of these, and with other core threads of our communities’ efforts: to support identifiers portable from one site to another, to reduce the number of passwords people need, to prevent one centralized identity provider from being the default identity provider for the whole internet, to support verified anonymity (sharing claims about yourself that are verified and true but not giving away “who you are”), support broader diffusion of strong authentication technologies (USB tokens, one-time passwords on cellphones, or smart cards), and mutual authentication, allowing users to see more closely that the site they are intending to do business with is actually that site.
Looking at use cases that government agencies need to solve is the best way to to understand why the government is working with the private sector to catalyze an “Identity Ecosystem”.
[Read more…] about National! Identity! Cyberspace!: Why we shouldn't freak out about NSTIC.
The Emerging Personal Data Ecosystem
This week I am heading to Telco 2.0 because the conversations with telco’s about how they participate in the Personal Data Ecosystem are moving forward in interesting ways. IIW #10 had several long sessions about the topic. IIW-East was full with each of the 8 time slots having a session about different aspects and IIW-Europe October 11th coincided with the announcement of the first community prototype personal data stores by MyDex.
Learning from one of the mistakes of the past – market confusion inhibiting understanding and adoption of user centric identity technologies. The Personal Data Ecosystem is going to be a “front door” for those seeking to understand the ecosystem overall with a simple message and clear picture of what is happening. It will also connect people to the community working on the aspect of the ecosystem relevant to them. Our focus is on developing the core communities needed for success and fostring communication amongst them. These communities include end users, large personal data service providers, companies providing data to personal data services, developers and startups leveraging this new ecosystem, regulators and advocacy groups along with the legal community and their efforts to create the legal frameworks needed to really protect people.
We arleady have a number of projects working on key aspects around the ecosystem and we will support their success linking them together – Project VRM, ID-Legal, Project Nori, Higgins-Project, Project Danube, XDI.org and IIW (they are linked at the bottom of the Personal Data Ecosystem site), This is a big tent ANY OTHER projects that are related are welcome. We don’t need another dot org to link efforts togethers so PDE is going to be chartered as part of IC3 (Identity Commons).
Right now the Personal Data Ecosystem site is aggregating content from blogs of those covering and building in the space. This week we will be doing our first Podcast covering this emerging industry – Aldo Casteneda who you may remember from The Story of Digital Identity will be hosting it with me.
Next week we will be able to collect links submitted via delicious for the blog. I am working with the fabulous Sarah Dopp on website strategy and online community development and Van Riper is working with me on community management.
IIW coming up in a week is going to be a core community gathering for emerging developments.
We are not at War
I was the first person Van asked to speak at the Community Leadership Summit West Ignite talks. I was the last person to submit my slides. I have a lot to say about community but I had a hard time figuring out exactly what to say. I knew I wanted to talk about the identity community and our success in working together. Robert Scoble’s quote really got me going and I decided to use the talk to respond to the comment that was catalyzed by his facebook post/tweet “Who is going to win the Identity War of 2010”
This is completely the wrong frame to foster community collaboration.