Identity Woman

Independent Advocate for the Rights and Dignity of our Digital Selves

Reflection

Interent 2.0 – deep cultural consequences

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I have been reading Sherry Turkles book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. The ironic thing is that it was written in 1995 before the Web really took off and became mainstream. I am going to finish it over my retreat. So far she has gotten me to reflect on the nature of our relationship to machines and how children growing up relate to machines. She has been studying their interaction with them over several decades and in different cultural contexts. I am reminded her work when reading Internet 2.0: the economic, social and cultural consequences of the new Internet
There are 4 levels to this model.
Disintermediation, Long Tail – which are concepts in wide circulation already. When it gets interesting is around Reformation and Continuous Presence.

The Internet is a reformation machine. It will create new fundamentals of and for our world. It change the units of analysis and the relationships between them

I think it does a good job of articulating the challenge to the ‘shape’ of our cultural dynamic.

The reformation model says fundamental categories of our culture (particularly the self and the group and the terms with which we think about them) are changing…. This is a change in the basic terms of reference, the very internal blue print with which we understand and construct the world.
Continuous Presence
One way to assess innovations is to make a guess about where we are headed. I think our economic, social and cultural destination might be this: we will be continuously connected to all knowledge and all people with a minimum of friction, and priviledge will be measured, in part, by how good are the filters with which we make contact with all but only the people and knowledge we care about.

Yes there is Post-Post Modernism

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I posted this on the Identity Gang list back in October. Dick Hart made the assertion that there was no such thing as post post-modernism. I had to chime in.. because it does indeed exist and it relates to identity.
Modernism has its origins in the enlightment ‘rationalism’, absolute
structure and finding ‘the truth’.
Post-Modernism is a critique to modernism. In this structure, there
are no laws maintained to define hierarchical culture. Post-modernism
that asserts that there no hierarchies and that all points of view are
equally valid (except that this is a hierarchy itself putting
non-hierarchy above hierarchy)
Today you have the emergence of Post-post-modernism. It rejects the
“flat” – everything is equal point of view of of post-moderninsm but
not super structured rationalism like Modernism. You might call it a
Polyarchy. Polyarchy was a term that I first heard when Drummond and
Kim were talking. Keep reading through the links…
As if Post-Modernism is not bad enough, reporter Alexandra Jacobs of
the New York Observer claimed her experience aboard the Jet Blue
flight that made an emergency landing at LAX on Wednesday night was
Post-Post-Modern. She said tvs on the plane were showing Fox News and MSNBC coverage of their own demise.
You can hear her talk about it on last week’s This American LIfe
“Back From The Dead” 10/7 – Episode 299
However, some differences are emerging that mark a new phase of
counter culture. One of the most obvious sign of this is the
reemergence of massive protests making flesh the networking of
cultural players who formally would have nothing to do with one
another. Examples of this abound: “teamsters and turtles,” garment
workers of the developing world with college students, anti-war
Republicans. Some may refer to what is going on today as post-post
modernism or hyper-post modernism, others might refer to it as the era
of Globalization.
In the polyarchic system, world politics is no longer essentially
“international” politics, where who gets what, when and how is
determined on the basis of bargaining and fighting among the
nation-states; rather, the international system is now seen as one of
subsystems of a larger and more complex field of relationships.
Panarchy, Polyarchy and Personarchy indicate that what is aimed at is:
– a worldwide open framework free from territorial sovereignties.
– a variety of voluntary systems of personal and social organization,
like parallel autonomous societies, even within the same territory.
– full freedom of association, circulation and action for each and
every human being.
mmm… sounds like people empowerd with their own identities and the
ability to use them to organize and empower themselves in civil
society and the marketplace.
I first heard the term Polyarchy when Drummond, myself and Paul
Trevithic were in Kim’s Cameron’s enjoying a glass of wine. Kim and
Drummond began bantering back and forth about this critical consept
that perhaps defines the what is ‘new’ and a critical underlying
principle in the coming identity layer of the interent.
There is no standard way in generic URI syntax to express “cross
hierarchy” relationships, a directory concept known as polyarchy. Yet
those of us working on the OASIS XRI TC have found polyarchy (which we call cross-references) as essential to the “internetworking of
multiple identifier schemes” as TCP/IP packet exchange is to the
internetworking of multiple LAN protocols.
Kim Cameron is a co-author of this paper on polyarchy.
We describe a new information structure composed of multiple
intersecting hierarchies, which we call Polyarchies. Visualizing
polyarchies enables use of novel views for discovery of relationships
which are very difficult using existing hierarchy visualization tools.
So there is post-post modernism – it is polyarchical. Polyarchy is a
critcial if little talked about property of emerging identity
protocols.

Announcing the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW2005)

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

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

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

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

Catalyst Round UP

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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: Government Adoption of Federated Identity

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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

E-mail and Identity on Opening Move

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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?

How it 'should' work.

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Doc is an endless source of amazement and wisdom. He has been communicating about this stuff so clearly for so long one wonders why they are not listening. At least the identity gang is.
The Net is a World
Craig Burton:
Think of the Net as a hollow sphere made entirely of people and resources it connects.
– It is the first world made by people for people.
We’ve only begun to terraform it
One of its virtues is the emptiness in the middle.
The Net is a World with Three Virtues
1. Nobody Owns it
2. Everybody can use it
3. Anybody can improve it
Notice the use of the word – body in these sentences not noone, everyone and anyone.
The history of the net is the history of its protocols.
Civilization doesn’t move all at the same speed.

mmm… this explains why marc is frustated with us meeting so much we are building infrastructure not buildings it takes a bit of time. Now that the infrastructure is there for real open standards for digital identity lets see what we can build with them.

Between two perspectives… Commerce and Governace lies infrastructure…

FCC – They don't know what they are doing???

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This guest post on Discourse.net is quite interesting – the perspective of young folks working in government moving blindly through the system is an interesting one to remember. The highlighted part seems to highlight what is going on with the US government ( FCC & Commerce Department ) and the ICANN

The O’Connor resignation, though, has been reminding me of the year I spent, way back when, working for the Justice Department. Late in the year, Harry Blackmun announced his resignation, and I found myself part of an ad hoc team putting together a memo for a White House working group on the decisions of Richard Arnold, an Eighth Circuit judge then being considered for the top job. I got the gig helping to summarize Arnold’s jurisprudence not because of any merit of my own, and not because I’d done anything like this before (I hadn’t), and not even because I worked for a unit of the Justice Department that was concerned with such things (I didn’t), but pretty much by happenstance. I thought we wrote a pretty good memo, considering that none of us had ever vetted a potential Supreme Court Justice before, and we were making up our procedures as we went along.
What I began to realize then, and came to realize much more fully later on, is that government decision-making routinely is undertaken, with the best of intentions, by people who have never been in this situation before and are making it up as they go along. I was working for the government again a few years later — this time for the Federal Communications Commission — and found myself part of an interagency group trying to figure out what to do about the domain name system. That was the process that brought you ICANN. And the most salient facts about it were that (1) we had the best of intentions; (2) we didn’t have a lot of humility; and (3) we didn’t know what we were doing. And it showed.

Chris hasn't blogged either

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I don’t feel so bad now…I see that Chris Cepi has not blogged since DIDW either. His last post highlights such as:

Best Semantic Transformation: Kim Cameron swapping “reify” for “thingify”
Most Predictable Vendor Behavior: Awkwardly inserting the recent Identity Theft instances into product and company pitches – for products and companies that do not provide technology that would have prevented any of the examples cited.

I missed Chris’ presentation cause I just was over tired and couldn’t find a plug at the back of the room. I promise I will make it to the next one.
I noticed visiting his blog that Thomas Barnett is in his blog roll – rad thinking our the state of our world related to connected and disconnectedness.