The iWDMS brings together professionals from traditional and digital media communities, as well as educational/research institutions from around the world.  With high level keynotes, cross-sector dialogue, expert panelists, controversial debates and structured networking, the Summit will promote knowledge-sharing, and will explore innovation, skills gaps, policy and research in digital media--including gaming, mobile, and social media--and the impacts on and advancements by women globally. 

I gave an "Ideas and Inspiration"  talk for 20 min about the Personal Data Ecosystem called The Old Cookies are Crumbling: How Context & Persona aware personal data servcies change everything and will transform the world and was also on a panel about New Media Literacies.

There are a few things I took away from this event:

1) Countries like Canada are very small with just 30 million people and the center of commercial/intellectual life in Toronto an event like this really brings together a core group of high profile women in the media production business that represents much of the industry.

2) Both the government of Canada, provinces like Ontario and universities like Ryerson  are very serious about attracting and retaining top technology and media talent with a variety of tax and investment incentives.

3) See point (1) because of that ...one must think internationally about appeal and distribution of any media across the whole world not just one market.

4) The way they talk about diversity used lang had language I never heard before the term "designated groups" included folks with disabilities, first nations people (in the US they would be "American Indians"), women, and ethnic minorities.

5) The idea that people shouldn't be stalked around the web to "monetize" them was new and provoked some thinking amongst those who made their living developing metrics.

It was great to connect to Canada again and I hope that with the IIW coming up in Toronto in February some of the women who I met there can attend and consider how media can change with new tools for people to manage their identity and data.

I got to meet up with Aran Hamilton  (@Aranh) who coordinated efforts around the NSTIC of Canada in Toronto. We outlined the possibility of a Satellite IIW in Toronto and I learned more about what is going on there.  Basically up to point  (1) above...Canada is small.  95% of people have a bank account and of that something like 85% have accounts with one of 5 banks (Bank of Montreal, Toronto Dominion Bank/Canada Trust, CIBC, Royal Bank of Canada, Scotia Bank) and there are 3 telco's. So it seems like getting an NSTIC like system in place in Canada could involves meetings with a few dozen people.  They have the added advantage that Canadians have a higher trust in their government and institutions like banks and telco's and have fewer "privacy rights" organizations.  So our IIW should be interesting and I hope that we can get some good cross over between the January 17th event in DC and this one.

After Toronto headed to the 4th MassTLC Innovation Unconference.  It was great to be joined by Briana Cavanaugh who is working with me now at UnConference.net.  The community was thriving and it was the biggest ever unconference that I have run at 800 people and lots of sessions.  Jason Calacanis who apparently has relocated to Boston was there.  Jeff Taylor was there and had a rocking "un-official" after party that he DJ'ed.   The most notable costume was a guy in a suit with a 99% on his forehead. Yes Occupy Wall Street became a halloween costume.

This whole line of thought to explain to those who don't get what is going on with Google+ names policy arose yesterday after I watched the Bradley Horwitz - Tim O'Reilly interview (they start talking about the real names issue at about minute 24).

More on my personal Google+ suspension that continues to Day 29.

Tim is struck by the Steve Jobs element of how Bradley and Google is talking about designing for the way the world will be not how it is....implying and even explicitly saying that in the future we will just all use our real names for everything so lets get started doing that now.   - you know happy future vision of benevolent design choice by humans of large corporate controlled digital systems.  Yes, many Googlers like Chris Messina who used to have a handle online "Factory Joe" made the conscious choice to bring it together with his "real name". For him the cost-benefit trade of for this and decided that for him it was no longer worth it. Totally fine choice for him. What is at issue is when his choice becomes all of our choice because he and others like him have the power to decide for all of us.

Young men like Chris have a lot of privilege in the world and they can do things/make choices that others have less freedom (privilege) to make without those choices affecting their lives in material ways (chances of employment, social acceptance between different contexts with different norms, having accepting family members who are not bigoted against their personal life choices).  I thought that one of the things Chris got form his years dating Tara Hunt was more of a clue about the issues that women and others who are not young white straight monogamous men living in western liberal democracy, liberal metropolises face. His posts on the topic include the following but some how...I guess he still doesn't get this issue in relation to Google (maybe he does but it seems like people who work at Google stop blogging upon their date of employ and Google employees who have spoken up on the issue have been gagged).

* Kirrily Robert: Standing out in the Crowd where he highlights these posts

• Recruit diversity
• Say it. Mean it.
• Tools. (Tools are easy.)
• Transparency.
• Don’t stare.
• Value all contributions.
• Call people on their crap.
• Pay attention.

* Future of the White Boys Clubs

* Future of White Boys’ Clubs Redux #fowaspeak

Fundamentally technology systems and techno-social systems are created by people making choices AND it is at this time in the history of the web we get to as a culture and society choose the range of options available for human expression of identity online.  IF THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE ALL THE POWER to make this choice in these digital systems have the demographic profile of Brad and Tim then we will get one outcome - it will favor them and their world view and exclude others who are different (ala the very long list of people negatively affected by real names policies). It is an abuse of power as danah boyd eloquently explains on her blog.

Tim goes on to say (at min 28) that his own reaction to "some of the strident calls for you guys [Google+] to change what you are doing" lead him to the conclusion "give me a break, lets try some different things lets figure out what we learn from them..the market will tell you what it really demands"

Lets look at this more deeply - Tim's specific labeling of the resistance to the policies as "strident" is coming from a position of power and privilege that is judging these people in a way that demeans, what they are saying.

From Wiktionary: Strident

1. Loud; shrill, piercing, high-pitched; rough-sounding

   The trumpet sounded strident against the string orchestra.

2. Grating or obnoxious

   The artist chose a strident mixture of colors.

Because the opposition is so sharp and clear - people are speaking up in shrill, piercing, "high-pitched" ways because they are being hurt so badly and deeply by requirement for real names and how suspensions are being handled.  The words of these people are being heard by Tim and others in power as grating and obnoxious because they aren't supposed to speak up...they should just accept what is happening to them right?

One response of Google+ leadership and technology leaders like Tim O'Reilly could have is to be to be empathetic, to look inward and connect to the human beings speaking and say something like:

Wow, we had no understanding of how "unfree" some people feel online and in our society broadly.

We had no idea about how many different kinds of people (who are not like us) are affected real names policies.

We didn't really realize existed, or had any needs different then ours and how can we struggle with them to make a more just society so they are not affected negatively if they were out/public about those things.

In the meantime lets really listen and get that they have real and valid needs for safety and the right to express themselves and lets and not ban them from our services for their choice not to use use their real name.

Instead Tim and others are dismissing the real hurt and anguish being felt by people saying they are being "strident" for speaking up for their right to pick their own name and to be for Google's continued insistence they have the right to decide what an acceptable name is for people.

This is about power and those who speak up to it being judged and labeled negatively for doing so. I asked in twitter yesterday if women suffragettes were strident, and were the stonewall rioters and the subsequent movement for gay rights strident? Yes they were! They were standing up for what was right and against and unjust social system that was harmful to people.  I am concerned about the rights and freedoms of nyms both because people have personal life issues they want to be free to create accounts to express/deal with AND because they have political beliefs they want to share.

Imagine if the people who were standing up and organizing for gay rights in the 60's and 70's had digital tools to do so and imagine all the major places were public discourse about this happened were in online social spaces where "real names" were required and imagine that all of their families and employers would therefore know about their status as a GAY  (LTBTQ) PERSON. Do you think we would have had the gay rights movement? Do you think it would have been possible? Do you think that enough people would have stood up knowing they would be laid off, fired, black balled, told their kids couldn't play with neighbor kids.

Many groups who are systemically and socially oppressed (yes in our modern liberal democracy there is lots of oppression going on) fear to speak up TODAY about the issues going on in the system that affect them.  Many people have ideas that would transform the social order but challenge power will fear speaking up about these new ideas if all speech in online public fora must be linked to real names seen by their real employers who could really fire/let them go.

Unless we embed the freedom to have pseudonymous speech in major online social spaces where serious public/political dialogue occurs then we risk not having a free society any more.  Free meaning the freedom to challenge injustice the freedom to seek greater accountability by those in power (government and corporate), to open up the systems that run our society.

Over the course of yesterday I continued to think more about the deeper nature of the issues going on and the fundamental nature of the power we have to name ourselves and what it means to have this freedom.  I remembered the series Roots  and suggested that young Googlers rent it from/watch it on netflix and then have dialogues about privileged and oppression.

For those of you who didn't watch it in the 70's (I was born in the 70's do didn't watch it then either),  it is the story of a Alex Haley's black family descended from a man who was stolen from his village in Africa and brought to America as a slave. He is very clear on his identity, who he is, he is a Mandinka warrior and his name is Kunta Kinte,.  One of the first things his white slave owner Master Reynolds does is rename him Toby.  He refuses to accept this new name, this identity that they have said he must take on...he does accept the name but only after great human suffering inflicted by his master to get him to comply with his wishes.

This is the sort version:

"Bonus suppression" Google runs YouTube and they took the clip of the movie scene down for "inappropriate nudity or sexual" - it has neither, it just made a dramatic point and made them look bad. In the clip Kunta Kinte is facing the camera with part of his chest showing being whipped from behind by a white man who is working for the slaveowner until he breaks. After repeating his name is Kunta Kinte when asked what his name is, he finally says... it is Toby. 

For slightly more context for the scene this is 8 min.

I highly recommend watching the WHOLE movie if you haven't seen it.

Just to be really clear for those of you who might not be tracking the point I am making. I and the other people in Google+ who choose to have handles/nyms that are persistent and that we are known by but are being rejected by Google+ are Kunta Kinte and the Google+ name police is the slave owner whipping him until he submits to calling himself Toby.

Metaphorically this IS what is going on.  "Yes" I and other people who use handles and use nyms have a choice "not to use the service" - we are technically "not slaves" like Toby is. However we have already been using Google e-mail and other services for years with the names we chose - in changing the rules on the Google plantation they have undermined the social contract that it had with existing users. Google is a major forum for expression of ideas and is THE dominant search engine (one could argue monopolistic search engine). It will be using people's +1's to determine search results and these will shape public discourse.

Many different people are now fearful of speaking up in Google+ about these issues (even if the are not affected) because they fear the will be affected (having their access to their accounts turned off). Just look at what has happened Google+ turned off Violet Blue's profile knowing full well it was her real name and people rightly so imagine this is because she was speaking out for those who were suspended and could not speak.

Back to what Tim said above - he says that "the market will decide" these things. The core issues here are freedom of speech and power within the social sphere not about "the market". It is about what is right and just in a society. The market decided that it was ok to do slavery for hundreds of years, the market decided that it was ok to discriminate systematically against black people with Jim Crow laws and the market decided it was ok to discriminate against women in professional fields like law and medicine until things changed in the 60's.

Continuing the quotes from Tim "lets the arguments be from efficacy not from self righteousness"

Let me ask you this Tim: Was Kunta Kinte being self righteous to insist on his own choice of his own name?

Update:

Tim thinks that I am being self-righteous for even asking this question. He agrees with me that Kunta Kinte is not self righteous to stand up for his name but adds that that I am self-righteous to ask this question which in this post was explicitly drawing the analogy between Kunta Kinte's struggle for his right to assert his own identity and mine along with others with handles and Nyms in relationship to Google+. The fact that he is judging us as being "self-righteous" kinda proves my point that we are challenging the the power and authority of the system and being judged negatively by the powers that be for for doing so.

Tim thinks that this issue is just a matter for the market to decide. Sadly he doesn't see it as the silencing of voices and the inability for those who are not as privileged as he is to speak with their own voice on the Google platform the dominant search utility for the web.

In the morning there was a whole much longer set of twitter responses kicked of by Kevin Marks and going back and forth with Tim O'Reilly and others.

Update: inspired in part by this post an amazing post "about tone" as a silencing/ignoring tactics when difficult, uncomfortable challenges are raised in situations of privilege was written by Shiela Marie.  

I decided to go in and change my profile basically back to what it was before all this started.  I put a  ( . ) dot in the last name field.  In my original version of my google proflile my last name was a * and when they said that was not acceptable I put my last name as my online handle "Identity Woman".

So just now as I did put a ( . ) for a last name I was told that a ( . ) didn't meet the real names policy and I could appeal so I did. There is no text field where you can explain yourself -  you can only submit your "Identification Documents" and "Links" to prove your identity.  This lack of ability to actually communicate/talk in a human way with the people who are making these decisions is really alienating. I did put a link to this blog post so we shall see.

I really don't want to use or need a last name. I have yet to meet any one with my name IRL (In Real Life) and it is very uncommon. If you search for Kaliya in Google. I am all over the front page as Identity Woman along with the mythical Hindu sea serpent that I share a name with.

I refuse to headline my "real" last name it is not "mine" and identify with it as an "other" name.  I am fine with it being on my drivers license and passport but it is not what I want at the top of MY PROFILE in Google at the heart of the social web as it relates to "me" the "real me" not the one on my legal paperwork.

At the heart of User-Centric identity is the freedom to choose one's name and this choice of mine is mine to make not Google's. We shall see how this goes over.

Here is my next posts about:

1) the broader political meanings of all of this: Google+ says your name is "Toby" NOT "Kunta Kinte"

Here are the previous posts about interacting with the Google+ name police:

* Google+ and my "real" name: Yes, I'm Identity Woman August 1

* Nymwars: IRL on Google's Lawns. August 5th

* Google+ Suspension saga continues. August 9, 2011.

One theory I have about why this works is because it is not obvious how you pronounce my name when you read it.  And conversely, it isn't obvious how you write my name when you hear it.  So the handle that is a bit longer but everyone can say spell "Identity Woman" really serves me well professionally.  It isn't like some "easy to say and spell" google guy name like Chris Messina or Joseph Smarr or Eric Sachs or Andrew Nash. I don't have the privilege of a name like that so I have this way around it.

So today...I get this

I have "violated" community standards when using a name I choose to express my identity - an identity that is known by almost all who meet me. I, until last October, had a business card for 5 years that just had Identity Woman across the top.

Display Name - To help fight spam and prevent fake profiles, use the name your friends, family, or co-workers usually call you. For example, if your full legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you normally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, either of these would be acceptable. Learn more about your name and Google Profiles.

Along with making this choice these are the other equivalently bad community standards violations that can lead to Google+ account suspension:

• Nudity and sexually explicit material.
• Hate Speech
• Impersonation
• Private and Confidential Information (posting credit cards or SSN's)
• Copyright violations
• Illegal Activities
• Spam, Malware and Phishing
• Profile Picture Your profile picture should not include mature or offensive content.

So here are the rules:

Google services support three different types of use when it comes to your identity: unidentified, pseudonymous, identified. Google Profiles is a product that works best in the identified state. This way you can be certain you’re connecting with the right person, and others will have confidence knowing that there is someone real behind the profile they’re checking out. For this reason, Google Profiles requires you to use the name that you commonly go by in daily life.

So, I AM "identified" with this profile. Here is a photo business card. I believe all of the above identified guys who have those easy to "say/spell" names work on Google+ or on identity at Google.  They all have my business card and got it many years ago.

There are several issues that I have with this statement that go beyond the point being made in this post.  Believe it or not, not all people use the "same identified" name in all aspects of their lives.  Women professionals who are married quite often keep their maiden name in their professional work and in social situations go by their married names.  They actually manage their contexts by having different names.   Say they are the local pediatrician and they don't wan all their patients to know about their practice of some perfectly harmless, but not locally socially acceptable, religious belief system, but they would like the privilege of expressing, sharing links and information about that religion with other members of their religious community and not having it affect their medial practice.

People with personas - particularly long standing ones, over significant portions of a life time, are someone real. They just don't link all of their life contexts together. Whether it is participating in the Society for Creative Anachronism, being a hard core board gamer, playing WOW or other video games, being in a sexual minority community,  the list can go on and on......see the Geek Feminism list of who is harmed by real names for a relatively complete list. These real people should have the freedom to express themselves online in services like Google+. Yes, impersonators (someone pretending to be Lady Gaga or whatever) and trollers, (people just being nasty mean) shouldn't be tolerated - that comes from social moderation. Vesting of identities (in wikipedia it takes TOR originated accounts 10X as long to get full editing privileges) and reputation for persistant identities (are they good actors in the system should be the question not "is this their legal name?").

I believe that a persona should be accountable for their behavior. We need new legal innovations that support a Limited Liability Persona - if the persona defrauds someone or is cultivating hate speech or some other egregious law breaking activity then it can be "unmasked". But it doesn't mean we create an internet where the only people who are free to talk are those who use their "real names".

I wrote this post on the need for Accountability Frameworks for the web. The current trajectory from industry, encouraged by government (via NSTIC), is that only "identities that are verified to be linked to real legal names" should be trusted. They are not currently including marginalized groups and those who suffer from hardline real-names-only policies (real people from these groups, transgendered people, black people, old people, women in technology etc) in any of the development of the legal/technical/policy framework development around NSTIC.

But back to my point for now. I am being my professional self to which this name and handle are linked. That is me being me.

I consciously made the choice not  to list either of my last names in my profile headline (they are both listed in my list of "other names" so people who search by them can find me).  Neither particularly feels like me and I am thinking about changing my last name officially some time in the next few years and doing away with both.  I am not keen on having everyone get used to one (because it is on Google+) and then changing it on them shortly.  I know I am not changing my handle any time soon. I might retire it if I choose to leave working in this sector but that isn't likely for another 5-10 years.  This is what google says I must do:

Use your full first and last name in a single language.
If you use your full name, you'll help people find you online and connect with the right person. Note that professional titles such as "Dr." or "Prof." aren't allowed in the first or last name fields. If you’re referred to by more than one name, just choose one, and place the others in the “Other names” section of your profile.

I am going to stick with my identity as I choose to express it.

This issue of names and being able to choose how and where you express them is about privilege and power and who is free to speak on the internet. What the terms and conditions are of speech on the internet.  Who gets to decide you are "real" or not?  Is it going to be the state who issued you a piece of paper when you were born? (2/3+ of the world doesn't have one of those). Is it the internet service you use to get your e-mail? Is it the DMV? Or is it the people you know and know you by a name depending on the real context you are in?  If the data base society we are living in means all uses of one's "real name" can be linked together, and if all the systems and services we use decide they can only "trust" us if we tell them our "real name" then we will live in a very repressive society.

Our logo at the Internet Identity Workshop is this the "identity dog" - He is an allusion to the New Yorker Cartoon - "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog"

It symbolizes three human rights:

1. The Freedom to be who you want to be online, i.e., the right to anonymity and pseudonymity.
2. The Right to curate the information about yourself that can be found online.
3. The ability to express verified claims about yourself and share detailed information when you want with people and organizations.

There are many authors who have also commented on what the cartoon's deeper meaning.  I picked up Cybertypes: race, ethnicity, and identity on the Internet a few years ago. It has this to say about what it means:

On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Dog; it is possible to “computer cross-dress” and represent yourself as a different gender, age, or race. In millennium America, this supposedly radically democratic aspect of the Net is celebrated and frequently and unconditionally. The cartoon celebrates access to the Internet as a social leveler that permits even dogs to freely express themselves in discourse to their masters, who are deceived into thinking that dogs are their peers rather then their property. The element of difference, in this cartoon the difference between species, is comically subverted in this image; in the medium of cyberspace, distinctions and imbalances in power between beings who perform themselves solely through writing seem to have been deferred, if not effaced.

This utopian vision of cyberspace as a promoter of a radically democratic form of discourse should not be underestimated. Yet the image can be read on several levels. The freedom of which the dog chooses to avail itself is the freedom to “pass” as part of a privileged group - human computer users who can access the Internet. This is possible because of the discursive dynamic of the Internet, particularly in chat spaces like LamdabaMOO, where users are known to others by self-authored names they give their “characters” rather than more revealing e-mail addresses that include domain names.

What is privilege you ask?

Privilege is a set of perceived advantages enjoyed by a majority group, who are usually unaware of the privilege they possess.  A privileged person is not necessarily prejudiced (sexist, racist, etc) as an individual, but may be part of a broader pattern of *-ism even though unaware of it.

I believe this is true of the mostly young men making and enforcing this policy at Google. (I am consciously saying this because Google is 80% men and they are mostly young and mostly living in, what one could easily argue, is the most liberal metropolitan region of the world).  They are completely oblivious to the the privilege they have to use their real name in all aspects of their lives and not suffer at all for it.

Geek Feminism goes on to share this:

Many people, when asked to check their privilege, respond with "So? Am I meant to feel guilty? I didn't choose to be white/male/whatever." A good article addressing this is "Check my what?" On privilege and what we can do about it."

I am sticking by my name.  It's Kaliya - Identity Woman.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Update: After finishing this post it seems that just petitioning google either via their appeals process OR via sites like this might not work.

The image that came to mind to augment the online agitation around this issue is - nyms dancing on their lawns in a "march of persona's" - I articulated it in more detail here a few days later. Nymwars: IRL on Google's Lawns - I created an (organizing list here), (get updates here) - we shall see what happens.

I think people showing up on Google's doorsteps around the world and being open to dialogue might be something more tangible then just written word. Real people with real persona's (along with allies who use their "real names" everywhere) sharing real stories about how they use their persona's and why. Looking Googlers in they eye who are mostly young and male and privileged and share their stories of age discrimination, gender discrimination, sexuality choices, weird hobbies they have etc. and why they need these freedoms. Hopefully getting some more understanding of how forcing "real names" doesn't make the interewebs safer but more repressive, less interesting, and less good for their business model - because people choose to share less.

The first version of this without the visuals was "Million" Persona March on Google.

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.

There was much discussion about the point at which things do get screwed up: Somebody grows by being open. Then they want to stay on top so they exert control (getting greedy about trying to keep you in or about money or information). When they exert too much control, then competitors can gang up by being more open (regaining the advantage that made the big guy big) or the public the big guy serves can desert.

All of which is to say that there are values that must be shared to succeed. But we’re still not sure what those values are; we’re still scribbling down Hammurabi’s Code. Once again, we are building a new society here.

I believe we start with the notions that:
* We all want to control our contributions.
* We all want the community to benefit if we in turn benefit.
* We expect mutual trust in the forms of transparency and honesty
* And we all — individual, collective, enabler — find uncivil behavior (spam, fraud, hate) unacceptable.

But there’s one more fundamental notion that informs this new society, a notion that big companies and institutions invariably forget because they were build in the old order:

This is no longer a centralized world, a world controlled by those institutions. This is a decentralized world, a world controlled by us.

And if you try to take control away from us, you will lose. It used to be that you could take control away from us and we had nowhere to go. But in this post-scarcity world, we can always go somewhere else for content or information or service. There’s always another news story, always another email service, always another search engine. Thus my first law, once again: Give us control and we will use it. Don’t and you will lose us.

I am hoping that in the coming year the tools that are being developed around identity can have some applicability to improved civil engagement, collective decision making and building more livable, thriving communities.

Democracy 2.0 Memes are articulated here.

I found a retreat to go on at Manzanita Village for 10 days. I was not quite thinking it would be about 6 1hour+ sits each day - this with meals and a work shift left little time for myself. All that meditating and eating in silence was GREAT though. Of course they didn't mention Christmas at all (Even though I was there for Christmas) but we did all 8 nights of Hanukkah and 7 of Kwanzaa. I should add that not mentioning Christmas at all was sad for me - I generally think of myself as a happy Episcopalian and I get tired of inter-religious meaning 'everything but christianity' in California.

I got thinking about our community around identity while there because there was several non-binary-gender choice folks who were also meditating. Are we going to build identity systems that are inclusive of non-binary gender choices?

I sat beside a young Transwoman named Hanah, beside her was a woman named Fred who by the end of her stay was wearing a bright orange button that said I might be transsexual. There was a Transgender Man named Jaran. It is not to surprising that there would be some transgender folks at the treat because Caterian Reed one of the Dharma teachers there is a Transwoman. In the end sitting there meditating - people are just people.

It is good to be back now. Everything is moving just a bit slower. I am breathing more consciously and overall refreshed. I just did a sidebar revamp that includes events that I am going to or might go to all the way to October (you have to scroll down to get it).

Join us for a good community building meeting, address your technical challenges building in Drupal and connect to others building businesses based on the platform.

Doc just gave me this to read about Drupal (and every open source project including Linux the subject of the article).

Jamais (the originator of the term participatory panopticon) has this article today about how Yahoo Research Labs have come closer to making it more real with face recognition.

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.

Remember back at the internet identity workshop in October? In the closing circle when everyone was talking about books they recommend, I floated the idea that we might have an identity movies/films to broaden the public dialogue about identity issues and raise social literacy on the issues. So, I think we have found our first film. Syriana. This movie is going to get a lot of play this spring - and will be a strong candidate for several academy awards. There are many differentidentity issues covered in nuanced ways ripe for discussion.

Does anyone want to help me work on a discussion guide? I wonder if anyone has configured a site do this sort of thing? Sort of seems like a good thing for to host on a Drupal site. I am open to volunteers to help. I will put up a page on the iiw wiki.
I am open to suggestions about what the next movie could be - perhaps one in video stores.

I was surprised to find you I was searching out my 5 year old granddaughter's name thinking I would purchase her name as a domain for her.

A five year old with my name will not get to be =kaliya oh well.
I am buying up some other ='s names today for me and some gifts for the family for christmas. They won't get it but maybe in the next year they might understand what I do in california. I just changed my contact link here to =iwoman.

Salim was a big leader behind the effort and started blogging yesterday too at - You've Got Ismail.

Mary mentioned I-Tags open standard Drummond had just got the spec up... there for you all to see.

Today Marc plugged i-tags from the stage today at the morning panel on syndication and RSS.

Here is an example of what I'm caling a "spref":

218.22.246.34 - - [13/Dec/2005:03:11:21 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 44403 "http://bontril.threethreethree.us/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Mac_PowerPC; AtHome021)

The geekier portion of the readership will recognize this is a line from the web server log file. See that bolded URL? That's "spref", a fake referer [sic] that is supposed to make you think that somebody from that page came to your site, and intrigue you enough that you go and visit that page. Of course, this referral is completely artificial, there is really no link to your site on that page, and you end up at some v1@gr@ site. So now we have: spam + refer(r)er = spref.

I also learned that the new governor general (the queen's representative in Canada - our head of state) is Michaëlle Jean an immigrant woman from Hati. Yes a black woman is our head of state (before that it was Adrienne Clarkson an immigrant woman from Hong Kong). Part of our identity is to really 'BE' an immigrant nation.

Technorati Tags: DocSearls, identity

Bruce Kushnick, of Tele-the-truth, (said with at Brooklyn, Italian accent),
has come up with some new Vocab to describe what is going on.

The Telecom Act giveth and the FCC taken away. The definition of 'deregulation' is -- those with the most amount of money and influence win!

Deregulation was 'open the network to competition'. Now 'deregulate the wires' means deregulate the incumbent from previous laws to open the network to competition.

I think it's time for some new terms.

Terminator-egulate --- To kill previous regulation

Fib-erize --- To continue to promise fiber optics to the press
release.

Liaregulation or Sayanythingulation. --- The uncommittment of
whatever you committed to

Derrieregulation --- Sit on your ass, claiming you're doing
everything in your power to compete.

Astroturegulation --- Get 50 ethnic, hispanic, black, asian, Jewish,
Christian, Muslim, disabled, senior groups to claim you need new financial incentives and more deregulation.

Killeregulation --- Death to VOIP, Munis, anything that moves.

Technorati Tags: Vocabwatch

Bliki from Riffs

Bliki is a combination of two popular internet interfaces: blogs and wikis.

A blog is your online journal. A wiki is an application that allows users to modify any portion of a document. A Bliki is a combination of these two things—the community, including you, decides on the content for any given item, whose reviews are the best, what things or topics are the most important to riff about, and how those riffs should be organized and annotated.

Technorati Tags: Vocabwatch, Web2.0

I am really excited that I have a user interface to actually understand what is going on in my blog. It show how important UI is because right now I have a log on my web host but it un-readable.

Comment from Ivan the below article...

A small company called Opinity is trying to address this issue by aggregating many different sources of reputation data (ie. eBay rating, credit rating, etc.) to enable sites to interact w/individuals to get the reputation item they need for that trusted interaction to take place

This guy gets it! They are actually not just aggregating 'reputation data' and ratings but also membership in various website communities (you can say you have xhandle over on site Y when you are making comments on bulletin board Z but how do you prove it? Opintiy gives you tools to do this.

If identity is what others say about you (Dick has defined it this way in his identity 2.0 talk). If you are a member of an organization and they assert that about you. (how else do you show someone the membership cards in your wallet online?) Opinity gives people tools to support you authenticating your memberships in various organizations.

He continues

...I'm afraid that they may have a "chicken and the egg" problem in getting people using the service in order to get sites to support it and w/no sites supporting it users will be hard to come by.

This is where his understanding break down. Opinity is offering its services to communities/websites to use.

Opinity is much the same, although they offer partners the opportunity to tap into the data. These centralized data plays have no chance on today’s internet. Why even bother.

Here’s what we need - a referee and a scorekeeper. Open (I didn’t say free, mind you) APIs in and out, not just links to feedback scores. Figure out the rules (keep it flexible) and let other applications feed the database. Somebody please build this. Or eBay, open up your Feedback API.

I’m not alone in pleading for this. See what Rob Hof and others have to say as well.

It is my intention that the afternoon provide potential implementers or implementation decision makers a very concrete idea of what they can do with i-names (XRI/XDI).

I want to let them know what they can do now and the schedule for the next pieces of the infrastructure being ready. I want them to know what people get 'free' with an i-name and what type of functionality they can start to provide people with i-names that no other technology will give them.

I want to paint a picture of the functional revolution that occurs when people aggregate their own data under their own control and how that lets any service provider give better service.

People should leave the workshop with an understanding that they can start to implement "Identity Centric Architecture" today and how that will benefit them and their members/customers.

From Mashable:

Quoting Bill Washburn @ Opinity -
The way we think about it at Opinity, individuals would also be completely welcome to put together multiple reputation profiles of themselves for different contexts, say one for ecommerce, one for professional purposes, one for political or dating or community forum purposes. An eBay rating could be shown in a profile or not as any particular person might deem wise for their purposes. The most important thing is that elements of a reputation profile can be made portable, aggregated, authenticated, and thereby be more useful and worthy of some degree of trust (depending on how broad, deep, and verified the profile is) everywhere on the ‘net.  

That’s more like it! I reckon these guys could be on to something big, if only they can figure out how to make plenty of dough from all this - their idea sounds exactly the same as mine, but the problem I’ve had up to this point is justifying it from a business perspective. You can’t really charge users, so you’d have to charge site owners/developers for any applications that hooked into the system. So maybe you have a new auction site and you don’t want to build a whole new reputation system, along with the high switching costs for your users - pay us and we’ll do the hard work for you.

Despite what P-Air says, there’s really no chicken and egg problem if you aggregate and categorize existing feedback systems (you won’t start off with a zero score if you can import your current eBay score from the start). But here’s the question: how could someone make this work - and would it even be worth the effort?

Identity Access Management:

What is a product like this going to buy me as a citizen of web? I can see their idea of a central repository of user reputation (something similar to Credit Reporting company). But all the big sites have their own repository and why would they want to share that. So, their basic approach would be to get the smaller websites to get to use this service. Now that is a big issue because why would most of these websites want to purchase a service they do not need. As soon as the customer pays via credit card, these people do not care about the reputation of the customer. So unless this system can help them

Lets take the model from customer point of view. Most people would like to get tangible benifits out of this before they would be ready to aggregate their identity information in one place. This could be in form of discount in online stores. In addition to that the reputation needs to be integrated with a identity engine that can build a central repository of their profile (which will include their blogs, comments on other websites for products, etc) across the web which can then be converted into his reputation (because without the "identity" you will not know who are the people talking about since there could be really large number of "John Doe" out there).

May be I am thinking too far into the future. At the moment, it could be more like something that gamers and others involved in online activities (like chat ) would use to aggregate and share their information out of box.

Micro-content Musings

I had a look at the Opinity service. This service allows a user to create a reputation. This seems basically to mean that a user can create reviews for people. Interesting, I would like to see a more distributed MicroContent solution for this.

A more interesting feature to me is the certification of identities. A user can submit identities (username+password) at the service. And Opinity will try to login. If it succeeds it has certified that identity. Something similar can be done with email addresses. In this way u user can prove that his various identities on various services belong to the same service.

I see such a certification service as a part of a personal profile.

Business week's Rob Hof wrote about Mary's assertions about the 'unportability of reputations'. We are having lunch next week to talk about it

On the plane I was scanning the Guide to CSR Communication.

According to a poll released by the Cherenson Group, almost 80 percent of adults say they would rather work for a company with an excellent reputation than for a company with a poor reputation, even if the company with the poor reputation offered a higher salary. (p. 13)

Tying this back to this morning's experience. I really wish I could give the taxi cab company demerits for not picking me up.

Comments on the panel:

From Educause

Kaliya talked about a new data web that links to persistent data. For me that elicited thoughts of Plaxo, microformats and XHTML. I may have misinterpreted her, but I believe she was projecting a growth in commodity skills and contract labor. 


Kaliya:

Let's talk about customers... companies in e-transactions get all the data on customers. This thread reminds me of the medical records data ownership controversy.

Liz posted about the "hollywood model" comment I made and how these was a wondering if this was actually a good thing.

___________
Lunch followed and Bud and I enjoyed a good conversation over that he blogged.

I shared with him the use case that I have been seeking to solve 'since the beginning' and is why I am so enthusiastic about identity.

The community that I am seeking to serve with my nonprofit
attends conferences but these are all put on by different but similar organizations. Why should these people who might show up at 4 different organizations over a year have to enter a different profile across all those activities.

This apparently has continued to resonate.

Also, I continue to be tremendously intrigued by Kaliya Hamlins' ideas for creating identities. What I envision here is that people create a profile or publish a profile that they think fits with the conference. They then use this identity for this conference and others like it so that you can find new resources via people you met at the conference. Obviously, SPAM potential is high, but the idea is intriguing.

_____
Other interesting panels included Kevin and Mary on this question - How do we scale meaning? They opened with this quote from Bruce Sterling.

Ultimately no human brain, no planet full of human brains, can possibly catalog the dark, expanding ocean of data we spew. In a future of information auto-organized by folksonomy, we may not even have words for the kinds of sorting that will be going on; like mathematical proofs with 30,000 steps, they may be beyond comprehension. But they'll enable searches that are vast and eerily powerful. We won't be surfing with search engines any more. We'll be trawling with engines of meaning.

Liz Lawly posted these great snippets for her talk on the question of is social software a mirror or a lens.

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us. Winston Churchill

This is true of social software they shape us.

____
finally the cocktail party headline - Identity women were popular at the symposium. I was asked by him if I was into 'identity' as in identity politics. I was like ... nope. Apparently others at the event where.

***(except there was no outgoing SMTP - so they were so kind to actually open the Harvard interent in the one room we were in but for future reference "open wifi" means open outgoing SMTP)

Technorati Tags: corantessa

All of our clients want to have data from web-based applications (i.e. transaction processing, membership management) as well as basic forms (i.e. registration, surveys, etc.) integrate automatically with the back-end database, in our case Salesforce and potentially CiviCRM. I’d love to see you guys certify applications that are compliant with these standards and give them a stamp of approval so that we could use them for clients.

The way the agenda looks, your audience really ought to be the ‘product managers’ and execs of folks like Salesforce, CiviCRM, CivicSpace, Democracy In Action, Radical Designs, CrownePeak, everyone building add-on modules to Drupal & Mambo, the dozens of membership management software vendors, etc.

Markets are conversations guys!!! you ask before you install stuff. Maybe you should go talk to your new social software aware property before you do more stuff like this.

This day shaped my identity as a Canadian. We had a remembrance day service every year at school in which we did two things gracefully. Remembering what war is really like and horrible it is (and that we should not do it again ever if at all possible) and a deep honoring of those who did fight in World War One, Two and the Korean War. Veterans sell poppies (plastic ones) starting just before Halloween and the money goes towards veterans. It is the last holiday in Canada before Christmas (we have a micro version of US thanksgiving on the first Monday of October.)

We had the day off and it was not just a bank holiday but a 'real holiday' where shat down. My family often watched services on TV or went to them.

I am sad that I did not get to experience remembrance day now that I am in America - it is deep. The days that are different here are numerous and the way we honor them in Canada are part of my identity. It is interesting to watch how when the days happen and you sort of participate but not participate. They you don't have your 'own version' and elements of your identity slip away.

Just something to think about in identity land.

Yesterday in Boston we had a dinner to explore starting a chapter. Most excitingly Neila and Peggy who were part of the original Planetwork first conference (2000) crew in San Francisco. Deborah Elizabeth Finn, Jon Garfunkel, Aldo Casdiena, and Beth Canter were there.

Wednesday Brian Hamlin (yes there is a relation he is my husband) is hosting Planetwork in the East Bay. There is a great line up.

Green Century Institute Discussion of the upcoming Digital Be-In 14: Earth Service - "the Green Be-In" - on Earth Day April 22, 2006 at SOMARTS in San Francisco.
EcoResearch MANAGING ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE, 6-8 September 2006 20th International Conference on Informatics for Environmental Protection (EnviroInfo-2006)
E-Waste Insights
Compumentor
Triple Pundit
SustainLane


Technorati Tags: Boston, Planetwork, EastBay

We have a whole group of folks working on the Virtual Civil Society. If you are in the Bay Area it is worth the trip. I had a blast buying professional looking organic cloths.

Here are pictures from today.
Jim is speaking to a packed audience about Eprida (a really cool carbon sequestration technology basically it pulls CO2 out of the atmosphere, makes fuel and fertilizer) there is an article coming out shortly in Scientific America soon. Watch the flash movie to get it.

Leaving the festival there was an ExtraCycle street party - Extracycle is a cool addendum to mountain bikes that make them Sports Utility Bikes (SUB's). They had one set up with a Blender on the back. And a whole bike embedded sound system pumping away. They are Dancing in the middle. Who needs a hummer?

Technorati Tags: Planetwork, Collaboration

I have like many many folks participated in this system. I have bought first albums then cassettes and then CD's (and now people buy songs online too - but I have yet to). When I make a purchase of these artists works I have bought the right to listen to them freely. People who had albums upgraded to cassette tapes (maybe) but likely for sure upgraded to CD's. If they did this they bought the work 'twice.' In the digital realm it gets even stranger where if you buy a piece of music on apple i-tunes you only get to copy it three times.. from one computer to the next to the next. Then it 'runs out' of copies. mmmm...but didn't buy the right to listen to it when you first bought it no mater which medium you as the owner of that music choose to listen to it in.

So far the whole frame around DRM has been device based. This means every time there is a new form that plays media - (record player, cassette deck, CD Player, MP3 on desktop, ipods and zen players....and there will be more in the future.

If DRM is to exist and not completely alienate those who are the end users of music it should be identity based. I - ME - I buy a copy of a song and I get to listen to it forever on what ever the 'medium' of the day is.

I would like to propose a better system that still means folks get money. Music and other digital work is completely FREE.

It is all on the web and we call all access it all. I as a listener to music only have so much time that I spend listening to music. I allocate some amount that I will contribute to the music payment pool in a month $50 - $500. Then the attention 'given' to each song is recorded. The money I allocate amongst all the artist/podcaster etc. is distributed between them (perhaps with me giving particularly enjoyable ones a bit more) based on my attention data stream. The artist I listen to actually get money! If I like them and listen to them over years and years they will get more money then they would if they sold me a song once. This of course needs a functioning micro-payments system it may be worth the music industries business to actually do this.

Technorati Tags: identity, attentiontrust