Related posts:

1. Identity Gang 2 – How did John get involved?
2. Catalyst Round UP
3. Mark Dixon – Best summary of Catalyst

The woman writing the article is very clear on the identity “creep” that happened and got to the point of requiring users to use the Real ID account within the system to post on forums and EVEYWHERE they interacted on company websites.

She articulates clearly why this creates an unhealthy climate and a chilled atmosphere for many users.

She articulated why she chose initially to sign up for the service using her “Real Name”

When Real ID came out a few weeks ago, I threw caution to the wind. Although my name is fairly uncommon, I immediately added everyone in my guild. I did this mostly because I like my guildmates, I trust them, and I’m an officer of our guild; it would be strange for me to not use this service. We killed heroic Lich King together, we make all kinds of obscene jokes, and although I’m one of two females in the entire guild of forty or so people, harassment is never an issue. I’m an equal. I’ve been here for over a year, and as such, giving these players my real life name wasn’t an issue.

Listen to her language carefully – she says “in this context” I trusted sharing my real name and my gender which is likely given away by her real name.  She knows her guild mates and they don’t harass her.

there was a smaller problem. The guildmates I’d friended had friends who could see me as well because of this. For some reason, Real ID came with the feature that everyone can view other people’s friends–that is to say if I friend Joe, I can then see Joe’s friends and Joe’s friends can see me.

In the process though her “real name” was leaked beyond this trusted group to their friends.  Some of whom may not have known her gender.

Now their “Real ID” system is being extended farther.

Blizzard announced today that all posts on their forums will be now using Real ID. This is mandatory–if you want to post, you have to post this way….real life names will be next to those who post. This will affect everyone, even Blizzard employees. They are also adding a karma feature that will be a lot like Reddit or Digg.

You think why is this “so bad” we should all just be comfortable being “out” about our gaming life or what we say online.

1st she highlights why anonymity is good:

The internet is largely what it is because of its anonymity–for better and for worse. Many great discussions have been had solely because someone could submit their words without worry of being judged.

She acknowledges ”greifing” happens because of this but that this is mitigated by moderation.

She says those who really do want grief other people are being given more tools to do so with by actually revealing people’s real life names, and addresses (in physical or online space).

by using a full name, players are tied to their real life persona and unable to separate themselves from their online one.

Taking away the freedom to “disaggregate” yourself is where the issue is.  People need to be able to be gamers and NOT have it leak into their real lives where it could affect their livelyhood or standing in a totally different community.

In this system, it becomes linked forever in search engines. This means potential employers could find out if a player was a World of Warcraft fan and even the characters they have with a simple search.

If you don’t think it is an issue perhaps you are not in a minority or in a “target population”

Women might find it harsher with new avenues of harassment opened. Transgendered people could be inadvertently outted when someone sees Sally, the friendly Paladin chick, posting under the name Steve. Someone could have a distinctive name and be disregarded solely because their name sounded like a person of a certain background, race, religion, or otherwise. And if someone’s a minor–or even major–celebrity, having their name exposed could be damaging.

Those in charge of and designing systems need to think twice before making changes.

Like I said, there were options. Unfortunately it seems Blizzard executives chose not to look into them and then turned a blind eye. It’s just a shame that this lack of foresight will probably at the very least result in the harassment of many thousands of individuals–if it doesn’t end up causing something worse for a select few.

As for me, I haven’t forgotten about the person from France who spent over six months to track down and attempt murder on a guy who fragged him in Counter-strike (NY Daily News). Call me pessimistic all you want, but I have to wonder if Blizzard’s marketing department even thought about it.

Related posts:

1. Queer Identities and discrimination online
2. Web Wariness is real
3. Social network suicide a possible response to these Yahoo! plans.

The theme for the event is Open Identity for Open Government. You can learn more about the event on the IIW website and register over on this site.

Related posts:

1. Internet Identity Workshop is announced May 1-3 in Mountainview
2. IIWX Internet Identity Workshop 10, Introductory Talk
3. Internet Identity Workshop May 18-20

This first draft of NSTIC was developed in collaboration with key government agencies, business leaders and privacy advocates. What has emerged is a blueprint to reduce cybersecurity vulnerabilities and improve online privacy protections through the use of trusted digital identities.

The 2nd draft is posted on an DHS idea scale installation.  There will be three weeks (until July 19th) for public comments.

The Document is 40 pages long and you can download it here. This is where citability.org would have come in handy to make comments… cause commenting in a threaded discussion on idea scale about the whole document will not be easy.

We will be hosting the Internet Identity Workshop in DC Sept 9-10 (Thursday-Friday) following Gov 2.0 Summit. See the announcement on the IIW site.

The White House post talks about the Identity Ecosystem. The document uses this phrase extensively.

I am reading it now and comments will follow here over the hour.

The subtitle is good - Creating Options for Enhanced Online Security and Privacy

Executive Summary Quotes and commentary:

Related posts:

1. Open Standards Forum Next week
2. Personal Anchors on the Web for Digital Identities
3. Thoughts on Community Engagement

The Identity Spectrum gives a understanding of the different kinds of identity that are possible in digital systems. They are not exculsive – you can mix and match. I will define the terms below and discuss mixing and matching below.

Anonymous Identity is on one end of the identity spectrum–basically you use an account or identifier every time go to a Web site–no persistence, no way to connect the search you did last week with the one you did this week.

Pseudonymous Identity is where over time you use the same account or identifier over and over again at a site. It usually means you don’t reveal your common/real name or other information that would make you personally identifiable. You could use the same identifier at multiple sites thus creating a correlation between actions on one site and another.

Self-Asserted Identity is what is typical on the Web today. You are asked to share your name, date of birth, city of residence, mailing address etc. You fill in forms again and again. You can give “fake” information or true information about yourself–it is up to you.

Socially Validated Identity is an identifier within the context of a social graph that is linked to and because of the social links it is acknowledged by others thus being socially validated

Verified Identity is when there are claims about you that you have had verified by a third party. So for example if you are an employee of a company your employer could issue a claim that you were indeed an employee. You might have your bank verify for your address. etc.

Mixing and Matching on the Identity Spectrum
You could have a socially verified pseudonymous identity. That is people recognize and acknowledge a pseudonymous handle/avatar name by linking to it in a social graph. You can have verified anonymity where attributes about a handle/avatar are ‘verified’ but the all the information about the verified identity (full name, address, birthdate etc) is not reviled.

Related posts:

1. FastCo Post on Governemnt Experiments with Identity Technologies
2. The insecure keys to our castles SSNs
3. analog-digital Clash – HIGH transaction costs

Part of this presentation touched on a timeline of events in the community. Those and more are reflected on this timeline that is beginning to be developed here. IIW11 will be November 9-11 in Mountain View, CA The first ever IIW outside the Bay Area will be happening September 9-10 in Washington DC following the Gov 2.0 Summit with the theme Open Identity for Open Government. The first IIW in Europe will be happening in London likely October 9-10 (dates still to be confirmed) prior to RSA Europe. If you would like to know about when the next IIWs have registration open please join this announce list. TheIdentity Gang is the community mailing list where conversations are ongoing about identity. You can follow modest updates about IIW on twitter via our handle – @idworkshop You can see IIW 10 attendees on our registration page.

Related posts:

1. Internet Identity Workshop May 18-20
2. Announcing the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW2005)
3. Internet Identity Workshop May 12-14

The turning point of the web becoming more social was mentioned several times today.

The issue at hand is fundamentally about FREEDOM: the freedom to choose who hosts your identity online (with the freedom to set up and host your own), the freedom to choose your persona – how you present yourself, what your gender is, your age, your race, your sex, where you are in the world. A prime example of WHY these freedoms are vital is the story of James Chartrand – you can read for yourself her story of being a “him” online as a single mother seeking work as a copy editor. Having a male identity was the way she succeeded.

We did a whole session at She’s Geeky the women’s technology unconference about women, identity and privacy online. ALL the women in that session had between 3-5 personas for different aspects of life and purposes. Many of those personas were ‘ungendered’ or male. I have not talked to many people of color about their online lives and persona management but should. I imagine that like women they choose for some of their persona not to identify racially.

Your “friends” shouldn’t be locked into a particular commercial context. This is where the work on client-side applications for identity management and social coordination for individuals are key. The browser was never designed to do these kinds of functions and I don’t think trying to make it do them is wise.

We need open “friend” standards where people are autonomous, without their identity tied to a commercial silo – like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, AOL, or any company. This is a vision of a web where I can “peer friend” my friends, and then no entity has power over our relationship. This requires people to be first-class objects on the web. Not easy to do, but essential for us to figure out.

Related posts:

1. Are VRM ideas gaining traction?
2. Google knows where you are….
3. Women I admire

Early Bird Registration is in effect for another month. Sponsorships and “big tickets” (for those who can expense a higher ticket price but can’t get actual “sponsorship budget”) are still available.

Related posts:

1. FREEDOM Infringed…
2. Identity Open Space: SIGN UP INFO
3. IIW IX is open for business

We are organizing an informal community Dinner on Tuesday evening at 7pm.

Everyone is WELCOME! just RSVP here on eventbrite. It will be no-host but not that expensive. We are looking at Indian places near the main hotel cluster for RSA.

The hosted Ping Party will follow at a location TBD.

If you were ever a part of or are interested in knowing more about the Identity Gang, OpenID, Information Cards, Higgins, Project VRM, PubSubHubbub, Salmon, XRD, LRDD, XRI, XDI, Volunteered Personal Information, UMA, Kantara, DiSo, Open Social, augmented browsing,  end user focused proctols for individual and community empowerment  this event is for you.

Related posts:

1. Identity for Online Community Managers
2. Identity Gang Dinner at RSA
3. Where is Identity: Supernova 2007 Panel: Do you know where your Identity is?

We are threading the needle of size and accessability. Our intent is to make as much as possible about the conversation public and report out.  We also know that the energy is really different with 20-30 people vs. 100.   We are seeking interest particularly from technologist who are interested in understanding how Lawyers think and how different aspects of law are going to end up impacting the technologies they build and how those technologies will change the law.

You can see the matrices we are looking to fill in here on the ID-Commons wiki.

Here is the invitation and this is a link to express interest in attending.

Identity Commons and The Kantara Initiative
present an identity workshop and symposium to
“Map the Gaps”
Sponsored by the Internet Society.
March 18th-19th, 2010, Washington DC

The event will be attended by representatives of the diverse identity communities to help “Map the Gaps” that currently exist between the policy/legal and technology views of digital identity and online privacy.

The intention of the “mapping” exercise is to benefit the overall identity community by cataloguing and examining the characteristics and approaches of various online identity-related technical and legal initiatives, so that they can be applied to find common ground to integrate the research and development initiatives in the identity space.

The infrastructure for online identity continues to evolve, and increasingly raises social and privacy questions which are large, complex, and cannot be solved either by technology alone, or by a “single-stakeholder” approach.

While technologists and lawyers have worked separately in the past, identity technologies are now bringing people together in ways that are so intimate and far-reaching that they change both the way humans relate to technology, and the technologically-mediated ways humans relate to each other. Many of those technologically-mediated interactions are the subject of various established laws, which must now be reviewed in the light of this evolution: the technology cannot properly develop without legal guidance and vice versa.

This effort will depend upon the identification and creation of common concepts, language and paradigms to guide future development in the area.  Our aim is to bring technologists and legal and policy professionals together, establish a common understanding of each other’s domains, and map out the gaps which subsequent work would aim to bridge.

The “Map the Gaps” event will provide participants with a forum to contribute various perspectives on identity-related themes, the output of which may be coordinated with American Bar Association events as well as within working groups at ID Commons and the Kantara Initiative.

Due to limited space, the event is being held by invitation only.  There are, however, other ways to participate in this important work, including submitting written materials for inclusion in symposium online materials.

In order to assure that the broadest possible representation of interests is achieved to inform the work that will take place at the symposium, all submitted papers will be made available to attendees and others on the Identity Commons and Kantara symposium-related websites.

Limited spaces have been reserved at the symposium for a few additional invitations to be extended to individuals and institutional representatives based on a review of submitted papers.  Additional invitations may be extended based on those papers that offer significant perspectives and insights that are perceived to be different than or complementary to those already represented by the existing symposium attendees.

Next steps:
The symposium will be interactive and participant-driven: we ask all persons who would like to attend the meeting as participants to contribute, in advance (and no later than February 28, 2010), a brief (250-500 words) position paper, analysis or other  description of an interesting or pressing problem they have encountered in this field.  Papers will be posted as noted above, and we will extend invitations for participation to the authors of those papers that satisfy the criteria indicated above.

To express interest in the “Map the Gaps” workshop and symposium:

https://www.isoc.org/isoc/conferences/registration/?id=19

Event Committee:

• Scott David, K&L Gates LLC.
• Lucy Lynch, Internet Society
• Kaliya Hamlin, ID Commons
• J. Trent Adams, Internet Society
• Robin Wilton, Future Identity, Ltd.

Related posts:

1. Online Community Unconference East
2. Legal Haze for Social networks. Identity and Freedom of Expression.
3. Announcing The Virtual Rights Symposium on Digital Identity & Human Rights

With Chris going to Google it gives them three seats on the OpenID board (Joseph and Chris are both community board members and Google has a corporate paying board member seat filled by Eric Sachs). It concentrates a lot of power at Google and I agree with Eran’s concerns from Marshall’s RWW/NYTimes article …why be “open” if you can just have an internal product meeting with Brad Fitzpatrick and a few other Googlers and “ship” a product without reaching out to others. I agree with the concern and I think there will be enough eyes on these individuals in particular and Google in particular to challenge them if they do that.

Thursday morning I sat at “geek breakfast” in Berkeley with a friend discussing Chris and Joseph’s move to Google. We mused about how many people we knew who “get social” have been at Google and because “Google didn’t get social” they were unhappy so they left, Kevin Marks being just the latest example leaving in the fall for British Telecom/Ribbit where he works for JP Rangaswami, the CIO who really gets open.
Given this, if “just” Joseph Smarr was going to Google he would be more “alone” trying to “do social right” at Google. Yes, he would have allies but no one quite as high profile as himself. With Chris Messina there too, there are now two major committed community leaders who can work the politics involved in helping Google to “get” social and actually do it right. If anyone has a hope inside that big company it is those two and I don’t think either could be as effective alone.
If Chris and Joseph fail, that is if they get frustrated and leave (which they can at any time they want cause they are very “employable” because of their profiles by a whole range of companies in the valley) then is a sign that Google doesn’t really “get” social and isn’t moving in the right direction in terms of supporting the emergence of an open standards based, individually empowering & social web.
With Zuckerberg’s statement’s about privacy and the recent actions by Facebook to make user-information public, Google has a huge opportunity to live up to its slogan of “not doing evil”. Over the fall Google made some promising statements on the meaning of open and took action spinning up the Data Liberation Front.
I know many people who currently are and have been at Google. All of them talk about how secure things are internally – it is not possible to go into their systems and “look up a user” and poke around at what they have in their e-mail, or what they have searched on or what is in their google docs. Algorithms look at people’s stuff there, not people. Google takes their brand and reputation for protecting people’s private information seriously. I am not particularly starry eyed about Google thinking they can do no evil – they are just a company driven by the need to make a profit. I worry that they might be becoming too dominant in some aspects of the web and that there are legitimate concerns about the monopoly power they have in certain market area.
I don’t see this as a Google vs. Facebook fight either. Chris, Brad, Eric, Joseph are all at Google & David Recordon and Luke at Facebook; they are all good friends socially and are just six people in the overall identity community made up of about 1000 people at 100′s of companies. Yahoo!, AOL, Microsoft (enterprise & MSN side), are all involved along with PayPal, Amazon, BT, Orange, Mozilla, Sun, Equifax, Apple, Axiom, Oracle, & many many more. They all come together twice a year at the Internet Identity Workshops and other events to collaborate on innovating open standards for identity on the social web.
I invite those who want to participate in the dialogue to consider attending the 10th Internet Identity Worskshop May 18-20.

I take the health of the identity community, its over all tone and balance quite seriously. I helped foster it from the beginning really starring in March of 2004 including 9 months from June of that year until January 2005 it was my first major job – evangelizing user-centric identity and growing the community to tackle solving this enormous problem (an identity and social layer of the web for people). I along with others like Doc Searls, Phil Windley, Drummond Reed, Bill Washburn, Mary Ruddy, Mary Rundle, Paul Trevithick, Dick Hardt, Eugene Kim & many others formed the identity community. Having put my heart, soul, sweat and tears into this community and working towards good results for people & the web, I don’t say what I say in this post lightly.

Related posts:

1. Chris & Chris on Data Portability
2. Community Contexts and Weaving Social Web
3. Chris hasn’t blogged either

..we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.

When I first heard it in the interview in the video I did a major double take – “we decided” ?? seriously? The we in that sentence is Facebook and clearly with Zuckerburg is at the helm – He could have said “I decided” and he as the CEO of a social network has the power to “decide” the fate of the privately shared amongst friends in the context of this particular social network for millions of people (see my post about the privacy move violating the contract with users). It makes you wonder if this one platform has too much power and in this example makes the case for a distributed social network where people have their own autonomy to share their information on their own terms and not trust that the company running a platform will not expose their information.

It is clear that Zuckerberg and his team don’t get social norms and how they work – people create social norms with their usage and practices in social space (both online and off).

It is “possible” to change what is available publicly and there for making it normal by flipping a switch and making things that were private public for millions of people, but it is unethical and undermines the trust people have in the network.

I will agree there is an emerging norm that young men working building tools in Silicon Valley have a social norm of “being public about everything”, but they are not everyone. I am looking forward to seeing social tools developed by women and actual community organizers rather then just techno geeks.

I will have more to say on this later this week – I was quite busy Saturday – I ran the Community Leadership Summit, yesterday I flew to DC and today I am running the Open Government Directive Workshop. While I am here I hope to meet with folks about Identity in DC over the next 2 days.

Related posts:

1. Facebook Changing Privacy Settings
2. Facebook Privacy Changes leave us “Socially Nude”
3. Privacy Commissioner of Canada opens CFP

Fed Up with Facebook Privacy Issues? Here is how to End it All.

It highlights two different Web 2.0 suicide machines; one is an art project called Seppukoo.com .

The service creates a virtual memorial for you and posts you on a suicide wall & they give you points for how many friends you had and how many of them choose to follow you to the “after life”. The leader board is here.  You can see the RIP page for one of the creators of the service - Gionatan Quintini here.

It received a cease and desist from Facebook and responded.

The response is not covered in the article (it wasn’t out when I wrote it). It has some great quotes that sound like language coming from the user-centric identity community.

5. My clients have the right to receive information, ideas, and photographs from those people whom are the legitimate proprietors of this data and can decide to share this data or to store it, with the prior consent of its respective owners. All of this is freedom of expression and the manifestation of thought and free circulation of ideas that is accepted and guaranteed in Europe and in the U.S.A.

6. Facebook cannot order the erasure of data that does not belong to it, acting against the free will of the owners of such data. This is not protection of privacy, but rather a violation of the free will of citizens that can decide freely and for themselves how to arrange their personal sphere.

Web 2.0 Suicide Machine is more comprehensive – covering LinkedIn & Twitter as well.

Here is the previous Read Write Web post on the changes in what is and is not public.

Related posts:

1. Other negative Cybermobs: Live Suicide
2. The Facebook Borg are coming.
3. Facebook SocialAd’s & Privacy

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.

Related posts:

1. At Burton Group Catalyst! Exciting week ahead.
2. International Telecommunications Union Focus Group on Identity Management
3. Identity Gang now a group in Second Life

We apologize to all our users for the breakdown of our service! Within the last hours the huge demand for 2.0 suicides completely overblew our bandwidth resources!

We are currently considering relocating to another serverfarm. Please consider suicide at a later moment and accept our apologies!

You can still try to catch a free slot, but chances are quiet low at the moment!

More from their site….

Faster, Safer, Smarter, Better Tired of your Social Network?

Liberate your newbie friends with a Web2.0 suicide! This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego. The machine is just a metaphor for the website which moddr_ is hosting; the belly of the beast where the web2.0 suicide scripts are maintained. Our services currently runs with facebook.com, myspace.com and LinkedIn.com! Commit NOW!

You can even see video’s about what happens as one uses the machine.

ok the FAQ’s get eve better…..

I always get the message “Sorry, Machine is currently busy with killing someone else?”. What does this mean?
Our server can only handle a certain amount of suicide scripts running at the same time. Please consider your suicide attempt at a later moment! We are very sorry for the inconvenience and working on expanding our resources.

If I kill my online friends, does it mean they’re also dead in real life?
No!   

What do I need to commit suicide with the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine?
A standard webbrowser with Adobe flashplugin and javascript enabled. So, it runs on Windows, Linux and Mac with most of browsers available.   

I can’t see my friends being killed, what happened?
Probably your flash-plugin is older than version 10? But yikes – you cannot stop the process anymore! Once you entered the login details, the machine is running the suicide script.   

If I start killing my 2.0-self, can I stop the process?
No!   

If I start killing my 2.0-self, can YOU stop the process?
No!   

What shall I do after I’ve killed myself with the web2.0 suicide machine?
Try calling some friends, talk a walk in a park or buy a bottle of wine and start enjoying your real life again. Some Social Suiciders reported that their life has improved by an approximate average of 25%. Don’t worry, if you feel empty right after you committed suicide. This is a normal reaction which will slowly fade away within the first 24-72 hours.

Do you store any data on your webserver, like password of the user?
We don’t store your password on our server! Seriously, it goes directly into /dev/null, which is equal to nirvana! We only save your profile picture, your name and your last words! Will the 2.0 suicide machine be available for other networks such as twitter and plaxo? We are currently working on improving our products!. Currently we are working on Flickr and Hyves, but of course we are eagerly thinking of ways to get rid of our “Google Lifes”.   

How does it work technically?
The machine consists of a tweaked Linux server running apache2 with python module. Selenium RC Control is used to automatically launch and kill browser sessions. This all driven by a single python/cgi script with some additional self-written libraries. ?Each user can watch her suicide action in real-time via a VNC remote desktop session, displayed on our website via an flash applet rendered live into the client’s webbrowser. We are also running some customized bash scripts plus MySQL in the background for logging and debugging, jquery for the website and a modified version of the great FlashlightVNC application built in Flex. Web2.0 Suicide Machine consists of roughly 1800 lines of self-written code.   

Why do we think the web2.0 suicide machine is not unethical?
Everyone should have the right to disconnect. Seamless connectivity and rich social experience offered by web2.0 companies are the very antithesis of human freedom. Users are entraped in a high resolution panoptic prison without walls, accessible from anywhere in the world. We do have an healthy amount of paranoia to think that everyone should have the right to quit her 2.0-ified life by the help of automatized machines. Facebook and Co. are going to hold all your informations and pictures on their servers forever! We still hope that by removing your contact details and friend connections your data is being cached out from their servers. This can happen after days, weeks, months or even years. Just deactivating the account is thus not enough! [emphasis mine]

How much does it cost to kill myself?
Usage of Web 2.0 Suicide machine is for free.   

Can I build my own suicide machine?
Theoretically yes! You’ll need a Linux WebServer (apache2) with perl and python modules (php should be installed as well). Further, you’ll need VNC-server and Java packages by Sun to launch selenium-remote applets. If you feel like contributing or setting up your own machine, please get in contact with us via email.

Related posts:

1. Death in first person shooter games
2. Other negative Cybermobs: Live Suicide
3. Suicide Options for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter

Facebook’s Privacy Move Violates Contract With Users

Your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, Friends List, and all the pages you subscribe to are now publicly available information on Facebook. This means everyone on the web can see it; it is searchable.

This represents just the latest instance of Facebook violating the contract it holds with its users. This is no small matter, either. Lots of people will have very real and valid objections to this arbitrary change to what’s public and what’s private on Facebook.

….an articulation of the nature of the social contract sites with social features have with users….

I wonder how many more times they will get strip us down, leaving our familiar social clothes and underware on the floor, and leaving us socially nude.

I think it is unethical and I agree with the concern that Jason Calacanis raises about how this will affect other Internet companies. “Facebook’s reckless behavior is… simultaneously making users distrust the Internet and bringing the attention of regulators.” This change will affect all of us working on building the new techno-social architecture of our society via the web.

Related posts:

1. Facebook SocialAd’s & Privacy
2. Facebook Changing Privacy Settings
3. Porn Spam App infects Facebook and “no one” cares?

She’s Geeky: THE UNCONFERENCE Connecting Women in Tech is  returning to the Bay Area January 29, 30 & 31, 2010  @ the Computer History Museum in Mountain View

Early Bird Tickets are available until Friday December 20th.

This event is for:

• Women Working in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematic Fields.
• Women into their gadgets and SciFi Fan’s.
• Women students of the sciences, those training to be engineers, aspiring mathematicians and technology professions.
• Women who are kernel hackers and all those who aspire to deepen their geekiness by learning how to code the php on their blogs.
• Daughters, Nieces and mentees of all of the above
• Women who are retired used to work in tech related fields.

What happens?

• All the women who attend are invited to create the agenda live the day of the event.
• Women can present/share about their area of professional expertise.
• Women learn from one another.
• Women discuss critical issues affecting them in the digital age.
• Women talk about work place and community issues they face.
• Women are inspired to follow their passion and believe in their own abilities.
• Women find connections and support for their work and vision.

About The Format:

She’s Geeky is an unConference where the agenda is created by all participants live the day the event happens.  This format supports peer to peer learning, dialogue about the issues that are top of mind and networking.  In this women’s only environment attendees have the opportunity to see their contribution to their field in a new light and gain confidence to step forward in their lives and careers.  You can see proposed topics on our wiki.

See a dip into the Twitter Stream from the November 13 & 14, 2009, sold out, Washington, DC  event to get a sense of the experience from those who attended!  Or to read answers to the end of day question: ‘As a result of today…’ click here.

About She’s Geeky:

She’s Geeky convenes to inspire women for the future, providing a gathering space to create enduring communities that foster collaboration and innovation, while promoting initiative and leadership among women tech professionals. Beginning with its resoundingly successful 2007 unConference in Silicon Valley, She’s Geeky attracts women from a broad spectrum of technological specialties, diverse social groups, generations, and levels of expertise. The inclusive quality of She’s Geeky events promotes discussion, furthers cooperation, and encourages learning. She’s Geeky advances systemic change in tech culture by disseminating effective practices to address the challenges of women working in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

If you are a guy please let your women colleagues know about the event. The event is for women only – we have thought a lot about this choice and why we made it – it is decidedly not about be being “anti-male” rather much of it is focused on creating a safe space for women who are geeky who have been shy to express themselves. If this makes you feel uncomfortable you can read more about this nuance and what we are about here.

We have sponsorships available at the community level, individuals and small companies and corporate levels.

We have some cool banners up on our website too.

You can find us on twitter @shesgeeky

You can contact us – info@shesgeeky.org

Related posts:

1. She’s Geeky end of January
2. She’s Geeky: An Women’s Tech (un)conference
3. She’s Geeky #4 is happening in Northern Virginia (DC Area)

Heidi Nobantu Saul did an amazing job collecting notes and we managed to get all session notes except a very few on the last day.

Highlights include:

• The session on Active Clients that went for several hours on Wednesday that was preceded by the presentation of an OpenID Selector by MSFT on Tuesday and followed by What should Identity Support in the browser look like? led by Johannes Ernst.
• The Conversation about Social Consent
• Action Cards continuing to develop with Kynetx & Joe Andrieu presented on Portable Contexts.
• Progress made on moving activity streams forward.
• The OAuth-WRAP conversations which are continuing.  Facebook also led a session on why they don’t support today’s OAuth.
• The continued evolution of WebFinger, XRD, LRDD & what is becoming know as the Hammer-Stack
• Salmon-Protocol to support comments “swimming upstream”
• The Trust Framework activity with OpenID Foundation, Information Card Foundation and the Federal Government.

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

Related posts:

1. Open Stack & IIW Proceedings for the Holidays :)
2. Web Finger! moving out into world
3. Open Identity for Open Government Explained

We cover what user-names are, how they are not portable, what it means to have a portable identifier – and talk about the open standard that enables portability – OpenID.

It is up on the Reputation Currents Blog.

Related posts:

1. What are Identifiers?
2. Reality: this [OpenID] is big
3. Online Community Unconference: Identity Session

What is an Identifier? is up on Reputation Currents blog.

Related posts:

1. What are identifiers in the digital context?
2. Online Community Unconference: Identity Session
3. FLUIDS…they are just names

Decrying redirects and iframes, Raskin tells of a brave new world where an in-browser button that defies navigational difficulties allows for something closer to true identity portability than we’ve seen yet:

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

Finally! They said it!

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

Aza open their post with this paragraph:

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

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

• Identity is part of where you are, and what you are looking at (Amazon looks different depending on if you are signed in or not). That’s why we put it in the URL Bar.

• For most sites, you’ll probably only have one identity, so login will be a single click or automatic.

• Putting verbs into the navigation bar isn’t new. See Taskfox.

• To increase visibility, webpages should be able to make a Javascript call that opens the login/signup bubble.

• For webpages that want to own the login-process, the account creation simply acts as the ultimate form-fill. For those interested in the evolution of the idea, you can see an early mockup with comments as well as Alex Faaborg’s similiar mockups.

They also make this point…

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

I agree with the firefox folks. Having a way to do verified anonymity is essential.

“Selective Disclosure” is the name for technologies that do this.

The firefox team should check out Stefan’s U-Prove Technology that may be released shortly by MSFT that acquired it over a year ago -

(seems like Stefan killed his blog when he moved to MSFT..mmm..anyways.)

Firefox folks invite people to get involved here.

Related posts:

1. MyAPI we need it now
2. Help! – I can’t get to Gmail
3. UX and OpenID the hickups are beginning

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

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

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

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

You can see the specific times of sessions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you to our Sponsors:

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are looking forward to seeing you next Tuesday!

let us know if you have any other questions,

-Kaliya, Phil and Doc

Related posts:

1. Internet Identity Workshop May 18-20
2. Internet Identity Workshop May 12-14
3. INVITATION: Internet Identity Workshop & IOS

SpuriousLogic spotted this story on the BBC, from which he excerpts:

“The High Court has given permission for an injunction to be served via social-networking site Twitter. The order is to be served against an unknown Twitter user who anonymously posts to the site using the same name as a right-wing political blogger. The order demands the anonymous Twitter user reveal their identity and stop posing as Donal Blaney, who blogs at a site called Blaney’s Blarney. The order says the Twitter user is breaching the copyright of Mr. Blaney. He told BBC News that the content being posted to Twitter in his name was ‘mildly objectionable.’ Mr. Blaney turned to Twitter to serve the injunction rather than go through the potentially lengthy process of contacting Twitter headquarters in California and asking it to deal with the matter. UK law states that an injunction does not have to be served in person and can be delivered by several different means including fax or e-mail.”

Related posts:

1. NTT and Twitter
2. Twitter and emerging currency
3. Peeling back the twitter layers

ReadWriteWeb has offered high quality coverage of this area for a long time and they seem like a natural convener of real conversation. Of course Identity is key to this industry but so are many other things.

Learn more here

Register here.

Related posts:

1. IIW Monday is FREE & program announced
2. When to share your real name? Blizzard and their Real ID plans.
3. Internet Identity Workshop is announced May 1-3 in Mountainview

The Obama administration open government memorandum called for transparency participation, collaboration and federal agencies have begun to embrace Web 2.0 technologies like blogs, surveys, social networks, and video casts. Today there are over 500 government Web sites and about 1/3 of them require a user name and password. Users need to be able to register and save information and preferences on government Web sites the same way they do today with their favorite consumer sites, but without revealing any personally identifiable information to the government.

Yesterday the United States Government in collaboration with industry announced a few pilot projects using emerging open identity technologies for citizens to use when interacting with government sites. I use the word interacting very deliberately because the government doesn’t want to know “who you are” and has gone great lengths to develop their implementations to prevent citizens from revealing personally identifiable information (name, date of birth etc).

How would you use this?–well imagine you are doing an in depth search on an NIH (National Institute of Health) Web site–and you went back to the site many times over several months. Wouldn’t it be great if the site could “know” it was you and help you resume your search where you left off the last time. Not your name and where you live but just that you were there before.

The Identity Spectrum helps us to understand how it all fits together.

Anonymous Identity is on one end of the identity spectrum–basically you use an account or identifier every time go to a Web site–no persistence, no way to connect the search you did last week with the one you did this week.

Pseudonymous Identity is where over time you use the same account or identifier over and over again at a site. It usually means you don’t reveal your common/real name or other information that would make you personally identifiable. You could use the same identifier at multiple sites thus creating a correlation between actions on one site and another.

Self-Asserted Identity is what is typical on the Web today. You are asked to share your name, date of birth, city of residence, mailing address etc. You fill in forms again and again. You can give “fake” information or true information about yourself–it is up to you.

Verified Identity is when there are claims about you that you have had verified by a third party. So for example if you are an employee of a company your employer could issue a claim that you were indeed an employee. You might have your bank verify for your address. etc.

The government pilot is focused on supporting citizens being able to have pseudonymous identities that function only at one Web site–the same citizen interacting with several different government Web sites needs to use a different identifier at each one so their activities across different government agencies do not have a correlation.

It is likely that some readers of this blog know about and understand typical OpenID. Almost all readers of this blog do have an openID whether they know it or not because almost all the major Web platforms/portals provide them to account holders–MySpace, Google, Yahoo!, AOL etc.

So how does this work with OpenID?

Typically when logging in with OpenID on the consumer Web you share your URL with the site you are logging into–they redirect you to where that is hosted on the Web–you authenticate (tell them your password for that account) and they re-direct you back to the site you were logging in. (see this slide show for a detailed flow of how this works). Using OpenID this way explicitly links your activities across multiple sites. For example when you use it to comment on a blog– it is known your words come from you and are connected to your own blog.

Using the OpenID with Directed identity–de-links your the identifiers used across different sites but still lets you use the same account to login to multiple sites.

When you go to login to a site you are asked to share not “your URL” but just the name of the site where your account is–Yahoo! or Google or MySpace etc. you are re-directed to that site and from within your account a “directed identity” is created–that is a unique ID just for that Web site. Thus you get the convenience of not having to manage multiple accounts with multiple passwords and you get to store preferences that might be shared across multiple ID’s but you don’t have identifiers that correlate–that are linked across the Web.

How does this work with Information Cards?

This is a complementary open standard to OpenID that has some sophisticated features that allow it to support verified identities along with pseudonymous & self asserted identities. It involves a client-side piece of software called a selector–which selector helps you manage your different identifiers using a card based metaphor, with each digital “card” representing a different one. Citizens can create their own cards OR get them from third parties that validate things about them.

The government is creating a privacy protecting “card profile” to be used in the pilot program. It is NOT issuing identities.

Trust Framework are needed to get it all to work together.

From the press release yesterday:

“It’s good to see government taking a leadership role in moving identity technology forward. It’s also good to see government working with experts from private sector and especially with the Information Card Foundation and the OpenID Foundation because identity is not a technical phenomenon–it’s a social phenomenon. And technological support for identity requires the participation of a broad community and of representatives of government who define the legal framework within which identity will operate,” said Bob Blakley, Vice President and Research Director, Identity and Privacy Strategies, Burton Group. “Today’s announcement supplies the most important missing ingredient of the open identity infrastructure, mainly the trust framework. Without a trust framework it’s impossible to know whether a received identity is reliable.”

The OpenID Foundation and Information Card Foundation wrote a joint white paper to describe how they are working on developing this. From the abstract:

[They] are working with the U.S. General Services Administration to create open trust frameworks for their respective communities.

These frameworks, based on the model developed by the InCommon federation for higher education institutions, will enable government Web sites to accept identity credentials from academic, non-profit, and commercial identity providers that meet government standards. These standards are critical as they represent the government’s resolution of the challenging and often competing issues of identity, security, and privacy assurance. Open trust frameworks not only pave the way for greater citizen involvement in government, but can enable even stronger security and privacy protections than those typically available offline.

These are all exciting developments but there is much more to do.

Looking (far) ahead there may be the opportunity to do selective disclosure–combining anonymity with verified identity.

How do these go together–you can take a verified identity claim say your birth date then using cryptography strip the specifics away and just have a claim that says you are “over 21″. Then using an anonymous identifier you have selectively disclosed your age without giving away your date of birth.

You could imagine this would be handy for citizens wanting to communicate their opinions to their member of congress without revealing their actual name and address – they could “prove” using a verified claim they live in the district but not reveal who they are. This aspect of what is possible with the technology is VERY forward looking and will take many years to get there. There is enormous potential to evolve the Web with this emerging identity layer.

I would like to invite all of you interested in being involved/learning more to attend the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View California November 3-5. I have been facilitating this event since its inception in 2005. It is truly amazing to see how far things have progressed from when we were 75 idealistic technologist talking about big ideas. at the Hillside Club in Berkeley. It is also some what daunting to think about how much farther we have to go.

Related posts:

1. The Identity Spectrum
2. Great Identity News
3. Yes there is Post-Post Modernism

This is, as a friend said to me, a “jump the shark moment” – these technologies are moving out from their technologists technology cave into mainstream adoption by government agencies. We are seeing the convergence of several trends transform the way citizens participate in and communicate with government:

• Top-down support for open government
• The proliferation of social media
• The availability of open identity technologies

The Obama administration open government memorandum called for transparency participation, collaboration and federal agencies have begun to embrace Web 2.0 technologies like blogs, surveys, social networks, and videocasts.

Today there are over 500 government websites and about 1/3 of them require a user name and password. Users need to be able to register and save information and preferences on government websites the same way they do today with their favorite consumer sites, but without revealing any personally identifiable information to the government.

The challenge is that supporting this kind of citizen interaction with government via the web means that identity needs to be solved. On the one hand you can’t just ask citizens to get a new user-name and password for all the websites across dozens of agencies that they log in to. On the other you also can’t have one universal ID that the government issues to you and works across all government sites. Citizens need a way to interact with their government pseudonymously & in the future in verified ways.

So how will these technologies work?

Those already familiar with OpenID know that typically when users login with it they give their own URL – www.openIDprovider.com/username. (see this slideshare of mine if you want to see OpenID 101) There is a little known part of the OpenID protocol called directed identity – that is a user gives the name of their identity provider – Yahoo!, Google, MSN etc – but not their specific identifier. The are re-directed to their IdP and in choosing to create a directed identity they get an identifier that is unique to the site they are logging into. It will be used by them again and again for that site but is not correlatable across different websites / government agencies. The good news is it is like having a different user-name across all these sites but since the user is using the same IdP with different identifiers (unlinked publicly) but connected to the same account they just have to remember one password.

Information Cards are the new kids on the identity block in a way – this is their first major “coming out party” – I am enthusiastic bout their potential. It requires a client-side tool called a selector that stores the user’s “digital cards”. Cards can be created by the end user OR third parties like an employer, financial institution, or school can also issue them.

In essence, this initiative will help transform government websites from basic “brochureware” into interactive resources, saving individuals time and increasing their direct involvement in governmental decision making. OpenID and Information Card technologies make such interactive access simple and safe. For example, in the coming months the NIH intends to use OpenID and Information Cards to support a number of services including customized library searches, access to training resources, registration for conferences, and use of medical research wikis, all with strong privacy protections.

Dr. Jack Jones, NIH CIO and Acting Director, CIT, notes, “As a world leader in science and research, NIH is pleased to participate in this next step for promoting collaboration among Assurance Level 1 applications. Initially, the NIH Single Sign-on service will accept credentials as part of an “Open For Testing” phase, with full production expected within the next several weeks. At that time, OpenID credentials will join those currently in use from InCommon, the higher education identity management federation, as external credentials trusted by NIH.” In digital identity systems, certification programs that enable a site — such as a government agency — to trust the identity, security, and privacy assurances from an identity provider are called trust frameworks. The OIDF and ICF have worked closely with the federal government to meet the security, privacy, and reliability requirements set forth by the ICAM Trust Framework Adoption Process (TFAP), published on the IDManagement.gov website. By adopting OpenID and Information Card technologies, government agencies can cost effectively serve their constituencies in a more personalized and user friendly way.

“It’s good to see government taking a leadership role in moving identity technology forward. It’s also good to see government working with experts from private sector and especially with the Information Card Foundation and the OpenID Foundation because identity is not a technical phenomenon — it’s a social phenomenon. And technological support for identity requires the participation of a broad community and of representatives of government who define the legal framework within which identity will operate,” said Bob Blakley, Vice President and Research Director, Identity and Privacy Strategies, Burton Group. “Today’s announcement supplies the most important missing ingredient of the open identity infrastructure, mainly the trust framework. Without a trust framework it’s impossible to know whether a received identity is reliable.”

Under the OIDF and ICF’s open trust frameworks, any organization that meets the technical and operational requirements of the framework will be able to apply for certification as an identity provider (IdP). These IdPs can then supply authentication credentials on behalf of their users. For some activities these credentials will enable the user to be completely anonymous; for others they may require personal information such as name, email address, age, gender, and so on. Open trust frameworks enable citizens to choose the identity technology, identity provider, and credential with which they are most comfortable, while enabling government websites to accept and trust these credentials. This approach leads to better innovation and lower costs for both government and citizens.

The government is looking to leverage industry based credentials that citizens already have to provide a scalable model for identity assurance across a broad range of citizen and business needs – doing this requires a trust framework to assess the trustworthiness of the electronic credentials; see Trust Framework Provider Adoption Process (TFPAP).   A Trust Framework Provider is an organization that defines or adopts an online identity trust model involving one or more identity schemes, has it approved by a government or community such as ICAM, and certifies identity providers as compliant with that model. The OIDF and ICF will jointly serve as a TFP operating an Open Trust Framework as defined in their joint white paper, Open Trust Frameworks for Open Government.

Both the OpenID and Information Card Foundation have been working very hard on this for many months – last night I was fortunate to their boards at a history first ever joint dinner.

There are two women in particular though who have driven this forward: Judith Spencer of the Federal Identity, Credential, and Access Management Committee on the government side and Mary Ruddy of Meristic Inc on the industry side. Both of them will be speaking about the project at the Gov 2.0 Summit on Thursday.

Personally this announcement shows how far things have come since I facilitated the first Internet Identity Workshop in 2005 with 75 idealistic identity technologies talking about big ideas for use-centric identity. I am really looking forward to discussing these developments at the forthcoming 9th Internet Identity Workshop in November.

Related posts:

1. Great Identity News
2. FastCo Post on Governemnt Experiments with Identity Technologies
3. Identity & Gov and & Open Standards

Related posts:

1. Great Identity News
2. Open Identity for Open Government Explained
3. Bio2009

When everyone has a cell phone, everyone is a photographer, when everyone has access to YouTube, everyone is a filmmaker, and when everyone is a blogger everyone is a newspaper.

When everyone is a photographer, a newspaper and a filmaker everyone else is a public figure. Tell your kids ok,  be careful every move they make is now a digital footprint. You are on candid camera and unfortunately the real message to young people from all these incidents… (he says holding his hands closely together) is really keep yourself tight – don’t say anything controversial, don’t think anything controversial, don’t put anything in print – you know what ever you do just kind of smooth out all the edges (he says moving his hands in a streamlining motion down) and maybe you too – you know when you get nominated to be ambassador to Burkina Faso will be able to get through the hearing.

What does this capacity to document “everything” digitally mean to free thinking, and free speech? It seems that is having a quelling effect.

I have written about the participatory panopticon several times, a term coined by Jamais Cascio.

* Participatory Panopticon strikes Michael Phelps

* We Live in Public – a movie

* “sousveillance” coming to NYC and Big Brother coming to NYC

* Participatory Panopticon tracking the CIA’s Torture Taxi

* Condi Caught by Emerging Participatory Panopticon

* Accelerating Change Highlights: 1 (Jon Udell)

The first time I spent a whole day with technologists working on the identity layer of the web in 2003 I asked publicly at the end of the day – how do we forgive in these new kinds of tools in place? How do we allow for people to change over time if “everything” is documented?

I hope we can have a dialogue about these kinds of issues via the blogosphere and also face to face at the 9th Internet Identity Workshop coming up in November.

Related posts:

1. Participatory Panopticon tracking the CIA’s Torture Taxi
2. Participatory Panopticon strikes Michael Phelps
3. Condi Caught by Emerging Participatory Panopticon

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

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

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

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

Early Bird Prices are….

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

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

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

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

Please put our LOGO ON our blog our WEBSITE.

Follow IIW on Twitter – @idworkshop

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

JOIN THE COMMUNITY MAILING LIST

THE INVITATION TO IIW!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are a wide range of projects in the community:

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

User-centric identity is the ability:

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

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

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

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

Related posts:

1. CC – Open Business by Soros’ OSI…the place to play with open standards identity business models?
2. Open Standards Forum Next week
3. Supernova Open Space June 19th – come talk about Identity

Related posts:

1. Online Community Unconference East
2. Online Community Interview about Identity
3. Online Community Unconference East

You could sum it up this way – “stuff happens in peoples lives and the need the freedom to go online and get support for those things and not have it all linked back to their “real identity.”

The slides are moving (drawing from post secret post cards) and it is worth watching if you don’t think people need this freedom.

Related posts:

1. Identity for Online Community Managers
2. Where is ‘the line’ – the freedom to socialize
3. FREEDOM Infringed…

This year there are 2200 panels submitted for 300 slots. It is great they are going with community generated ideas for the conference. It is also hard to tell what will be happening in our fast moving industry 7 months from now. PLEASE go to SXSW create an account and then vote for these two

I put a lot of thought in to what to put forward this year knowing it would be 9 months out. One of the trends that is just starting to emerge is identity verification – my hunch is that by March this will be a topic getting a lot of attention and worth exploring at SXSW.

Who are you? Identity trends on the Social Web.

“On the Internet Nobody Knows You’re a Dog” Is this famous New Yorker cartoon still true? Twitter is doing verified accounts. Facebook claims everyone using their “real name” gives strong social validation ‘proof’. Equifax is validating age with information cards (digital tokens). We will explore the current trends and their implications for the future.

1. What is identity?
2. Why are people doing identity validation?
3. Who is doing identity validation?
4. Why are websites seeking people who have had their identities validated?
5. Is identity validation improving the web?
6. What are the current open standards in this space?
7. Are approaches by men and women different about idnetity presentation and validation?
8. What kinds of businesses are requiring online identity validation for customers?
9. Is identity validation going to squish “free speech”?
10. How is this trend changing the web?

With my She’s Geeky hat on: What Guys are Doing to Get More Girls in Tech!

The point of this is to get beyond the women say there are issues in the field and guys say there isn’t – to have guys who know there is an issue and are proactively doing constructive stuff to address it.

Many tech fields have a low percentage of women. If you are a guy do you wonder what you can do about it? Learn about successful strategies and proactive approaches for supporting women you work with and participate in community with. We will even cover some well-intentioned efforts that have gone awry.

1. How many women by percentage participate in different technical fields?
2. Why does it matter that they are underrepresented in these fields?
3. What are the cultural norms that men and women have about performance and self-promotion?
4. What is Male Programmer Privilege?
5. What can a guy do who has a sister that is math/science inclined but being steered away from the field?
6. How have the men on the panel improved things in their workplaces?
7. How have the men on the panel addressed the challenges that arise in open communities? (that is where you don’t have a boss that fires people for inappropriate behavior/comments)
8. What are the qualities of a workplace that is friendly for women?
9. How to go beyond tokenism in workplaces, communities and conferences?
10. How to encourage women more?

Other interesting Preso/panels covering Identity topics:

The Politics & Economics of Identity Put forward by my friend Liza Sabature of Culture Kitchen and the Daily Gotham Identity Politics” has always been left to the realm of feminist, civil rights activists, aka “minority politics”. This panel will explore the social and political ramifications of the business of identity and reputation. We will talk about the good, the bad and the ugly and what social entrepreneurs, businesses and digital activists are doing to impact this new economy.

1. What is identity?
2. What is reputation?
3. What is privacy?
4. How have big business historical monetized privacy?
5. How social media works on identity and reputation?
6. Online surveillance in the US : DMCA, FISA, Patriot Act
7. Facebook BEACON : a study on how not to spy on people for fun and profit
8. Google Adsense or Spysense?
9. What are Vendor-Relationship Management systems?
10. Will we need “Identity Management Systems” instead of VRMs?

Distributed Identity: API’s of the Semantic Web Without much conscious thought, most of us have built identities across the web. We fill in profiles, upload photos, videos, reviews and bookmarks. This session will explore the practical use of Social Graph API and YQL to build new types of user experience combining identity discovery and data portability.

Online Gatekeeping: Who Died and Made You King? by Liz Burr As the web becomes more open via social networks, we’re adopting new rules of communication. But who creates these rules? How much does class, race and gender figure into social media policing? We’ll discuss how identity affects social networks, as well as look at how online communities police themselves as participation expands.

1. Which groups are in control of what is worth sharing via social media?
2. Are the under-25 community using social media differently?
3. How do we recognize and confront social media ‘gatekeepers’?
4. Is our behavior in online communities merely a reflection of offline stereotypes and experiences?
5. What is the impact of the amplification of social stereotypes online on under-represented groups?
6. How do we integrate previously, under-represented groups into this more social world?
7. Is there really such a thing as a “digital ghetto”? If so, is it our responsiblity to combat it?

OpenID: Identity is the platform is put forward by Chis Messina.
I have to say it is really great to have this be put forward so plainly and simply – to “get religion” about user-centric tdentity and its central role in shaping the fugure the social web.

Ignore the hype over social networking platforms and web OS’s! The platform of the social web is identity. Facebook and Twitter Connect are just the beginning of the era of user-centric identity. I’ll go beyond the basics of OpenID and learn how to effectively incorporate internet identity into your apps.

Your Online Identity After Death and Digital Wills

If you died tomorrow, would someone take care of your internet accounts? How do you tell subscribers the blogger has died? Every day people die and no one can access their email. Let’s explore what can be done to manage your online identity after you pass on.

1. What usually happens to email accounts when a person dies? Policies for Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL
2. What about WordPress.com and Blogger for digital policies concerning the death of a blogger?
3. Do You have a digital will setup?
4. Products and services to manage digital wills, electronic correspondence after death and auto replies.
5. Grief, “You Have Mail” and online memorial services.
6. Who owns blog content after the death of a blogger?
7. How to calculate the worth of your website or blog.
8. How can you manage your online accounts and passwords for easy access after you pass?
9. What are some recent legal examples of online account ownership disagreements?
10. How to keep your passwords safe?

How to Benefit from 1-Click Identity Providers by Luke Shepard from Facebook.

Sites across the Web are opening up to support open identity platforms, such as OpenID. How can companies at scale and those with large user bases successfully work with open standards including OpenID, Activity Streams and new social markup language specs? Can companies survive the challenges of incorporating OpenID into their websites?

1. Are there any success stories with OpenID?
2. What does the OpenID user experience look like?
3. Who has implemented OpenID?
4. What have been some of the failures of OpenID?
5. What is OpenID?
6. What are the user benefits of OpenID?
7. How can websites educate users about open protocols?
8. What are the privacy concerns around OpenID?
9. What kind of user data is made available to sites when they implement OpenID?
10. What will it take for OpenID to become mainstream?

Crime Scene: Digital Identity Theft

Related posts:

1. Identity Talk at Net Squared Year Three
2. Identity events of the year – Part 1
3. SXSW – Hula Hut edition of Social Web TV

For those of you who don’t know Johannes he developed Light-Weight Identity (LID) a URL based ID system at the same time Brad Fitzpatrick did at Live Journal and then participated in merging it all together into YADIS discovery which became woven together with OpenIDv1, XRI/i-names  and sxip to become OpenIDv2. He also was the first drawer of the identity triangle (OpenID, SAML, InfoCards) which evolved into the Venn of Identity.

Many people have ideas for value-added services that could be sold once sufficiently many users used internet identities at enough sites. The trouble is that the transaction volume for OpenID (or any other identity technology on the internet) is still far too low to make this viable.

The mot important sentence is this one – Let’s not confuse being majorly annoyed how long this is all taking (speaking about myself here) with something being fundamentally wrong (because there isn’t).

I take heart with what he has to say especially because he addresses it to a big part of what I do – organize (un)conferences to continue momentum for the field.

From his post:

Value-added services:
Many people have ideas for value-added services that could be sold once sufficiently many users used internet identities at enough sites. The trouble is that the transaction volume for OpenID (or any other identity technology on the internet) is still far too low to make this viable.

So the verdict here is: perhaps in the future.   

So what’s an analyst, or conference organizer, or entrepreneur, or venture capitalist to do?

My take: Hang in there, keep the burn rate low, make no major moves, would be my advice. (Believe it or not, sometimes I’m being asked about my advice on this.) All the signs are pointing in the right direction, the latest being Google’s major OpenID push. Let’s not confuse being majorly annoyed how long this is all taking (speaking about myself here) with something being fundamentally wrong (because there isn’t).

Sooner or later, at least the value-added services opportunity will emerge. Perhaps others. But so far it has not yet.

Related posts:

1. FastCo Post on Governemnt Experiments with Identity Technologies
2. CC – Open Business by Soros’ OSI…the place to play with open standards identity business models?
3. its that SXSW picking time of year

The theme of the event will be “Transparent Government: Risk, Rewards, and Repercussions.”

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will be hosting it in Gainthersburg, Maryland.

In the why attend the reference part of a directive by Barack Obama to the National Security Council and Homeland Security Council.

“to defend our information and communications infrastructure, strengthen public/private partnerships, invest in cutting edge research and development and to begin a national campaign to promote cyber-security awareness and digital literacy.” The U.S. federal government aims to accomplish all of this while becoming increasingly open and transparent.

The program is now available – and looks quite good.

There is a discount available until August 31. There are special registration proceedures for non-US citizens.

Related posts:

1. Open Standards Forum Next week
2. Will Netizen rights be protected?
3. Open Identity for Open Government Explained

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

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

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

Chris Messina spliced it together

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

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

All exciting stuff.

Related posts:

1. Open Stack & IIW Proceedings for the Holidays :)
2. Chris Messina at Google – Good for him, Google & The Identity/Social Web Community.
3. Index Finger Scanning at Disney World + FastTrack Scanning

A Perfect Storm Forming for Distributed Social Networking- Read Write Web

Evolution of Blogging – GigaOm

The Push Button Web – Anil Dash

The inside Out Social Network – Chris Messina

The Future Social Web – Jeremiah Owyang

I realize how incredibly ahead of the times I was along with many of the people I have been working with on open standards identity and social web standards.

I wrote this describing open standards for distributed social networking online in April of 2004f or the Planetwork Conference (from Archive.org)  that I was promoting.

———————— From Archive.org April 2004 ——————

In 2003 the Planetwork LinkTank white paper The Augmented Social Network: Building Identity and Trust into the Next-Generation Internet proposed weaving new layers of identity and trust into the fabric of the Internet to facilitate social networking for social good – online citizenship for the information age.

The LinkTank white paper outlined three main objectives:

1. Establishing a new kind of persistent online identity that supports the public commons and the values of civil society.
3. Enhancing the ability of citizens to form relationships and self-organize around shared interests in communities of practice and engage in democratic governance.
5. Creating an Internet-wide system for more efficient and effective knowledge sharing between people across institutional, geographic, and social boundaries.

Currently each site with a login or membership profile is like an island, or at worst a walled castle, as no common inter-operation is possible among large numbers of them. Creating a truly interoperable network will require an explicit social agreement that governs the operation of the trusted network, and implementation of a new software protocol consistent with that agreement.

Identity Commons

[note this is a reference to the "first" Identity Commons - the current Identity Commons shares the values and some of the organizing principles of this first organization but evolved from it]

The Identity Commons is an open distributive membership organization, designed to develop and operate a common digital identity infrastructure standard based on the shared principle of protecting each user’s control of their own identity data. A common identity infrastructure must be embedded within a binding social agreement ensuring that the technology and its institutional users operate in accordance with core principles. In addition to developing this agreement, Identity Commons is managing the development and implementation of the new technology needed to achieve this as a fiscal project of Planetwork, a California 501(c)3 non-profit.

The Identity Commons is based on an implementation of two new OASIS standards:

XRI – a new identity addressing scheme fully compatible with URIs
XDI – specifies link contracts for shared use of data across the Internet

For more technical information see: http://xrixdi.idcommons.net

Once implemented, the Identity Commons infrastructure will:

• Give individuals, organizations, and even ad-hoc groups persistent addresses (digital identities) that can be used in many ways. Each party can decide what their own address links to, and who can follow the links.
• Provide single sign-on, enabling individuals to connect to multiple sites without having to provide a login and password to each.
• Empower user/citizens to manage their own consolidated profiles, which will be likely to stay up to date as everyone maintains only their own master copy.
• Generate network maps that enable communities to more efficiently understand their own membership, make connections, recognize patterns, filter messages, and self-organize around new topics and functions.
• Provide collaborative filtering services based on knowledge and reputation databases where contributors can also control their own level of anonymity.
• Enable group formation around common interests and affinities with reputation attributes for trusted communication, which could be the key to eliminate spam.

How is this different from what is already happening in the private sector?

Currently every web site has a privacy policy, but they vary widely, are rarely read, are only good until they are changed and are thus effectively useless.

The Identity Commons (IC) solves this by (1) replacing thousands of privacy policies with a single institutional membership agreement that simplifies the user experience. Every Identity Commons member site is party to a legally binding commitment that can only be changed by amending the IC membership agreement – which is governed by all IC members. And (2) by using electronic contracts to grant, record, and enforce data sharing across boundaries.

Ultimately there can only be one fully interoperable social network; just as email can travel anywhere on the Internet, your profile must also be able to do so. Microsoft would love to make this possible, and fully control it – their Passport system was designed to do just that. By hosting identity data for nearly everyone who has a computer Microsoft hopes to put themselves in the middle of every transaction they can.

In response to this, a group of large companies formed the Liberty Alliance which developed protocols that will allow institutions to “federate” data across company boundaries. Federation is an improvement over the Microsoft Passport model, however, both of these approaches treat individuals solely as consumers, and neither provide support for civil society, citizen collaboration or for individual citizens to control their own identity data.

The Identity Commons agreement and technical infrastructure is a way to correct this imbalance of power, allowing the Internet to fulfill its great potential as a “commons” in which individual citizens can interact freely and as equals everywhere on Earth.

————- end Identity Commons description from Planetwork’s 2004 site ———

Writing this document was the first work that I did as an evangelist for the proposed open standards for distributed digital identity to enable open distributed social networks.
I wrote it based on reading through all their work and listening to their vision of the founders of Identity Commons and those working together for 2+ years hoped for in the adoption of the open standards they were working on. These protocols are now all ratified in OASIS (one of three standards bodies for the internet the other two being IETF and W3C) – XRI, XDI along with XRD/XRD that spun out of XRI as it became incorporated in OpenIDv2 as a key part of what makes it work.

Identity that is user owned, controlled managed – and this includes the preferences, attention data, uterances, 1/2 of transaction data – is at the heart of what one needs to make this vision of distributed social networking work. I think until recently it has been misunderstood as esoteric and just talk – amazing progress has been made since the early days of the identity gang that community has grown and developed many of the conceptual understandings and protocols that are taken as givens.

Folks from what the identity community (and perhaps should consider “updating” its name to the identity and social web community).…invented – as in used for the first time these two words together Social and Web – SOCIAL WEB – (according to wikipedia)

With the title of this paper: The Social Web: Creating An Open Social Network with XDI

This paper was preceeded by the Augmented Social Network: Building and Trust into the Next Generation Internet

Like the Web or email, the ASN would be available to anyone. It would become a common part of the Internet infrastructure – a person-centered and group-centered service of the net. It will be implemented through the widespread adoption of technical protocols; any online community infrastructure could choose to be part of the ASN by implementing them. Central to its design are fundamental principles of openness, inclusivity, and decentralization — which are necessary for a thriving democracy. At the same time, the ASN would support the highest available forms of security to protect privacy.

The Identity Gang began talking/meeting in the later part 2004 and has continued to meet in the Internet Identity Workshop.

There is much wisdom that these communities have developed that can be useful in moving / re-articulating the vision… to be sure lessons are to be learned from understanding more about why certain approaches/standards/proposed ways of doing things didn’t happen (yet).

I think the market wasn’t ready for what the identity community was saying. As someone who has been evangelizing about this set of issues practically full time since 2004. In the first few years I would talk in a range of communities and at conferences about all these issues, user control, open standards the danger of the potential emergence of large silo’s that locked users in and people just “didn’t get” it was an issue or that there was even a need for these kinds of standards. Now the market is finally ready.

The 9th Internet Identity Workshop  is this November – and REGISTRATION IS OPEN!

There is a whole conversation on the DiSo list where I highlighted this context/history. There might be a beer meetup in Berkeley this evening at Triple Rock at 7:30.

Related posts:

1. At the Ideas Project apparently women don’t have any ideas.
2. Thinking about for the future: Two ideas from Dave Winer
3. Identity interoperability @ Net2

IDENTITÄT: the »Gestalt « of digital identity

From the far end of the Concept page:

The goal of the project was not to create a readable data sculpture of someone’s digital life, but to express how an analogue snapshot of complex dig­ital identities can be presented. Based on four de­fined cri­te­ria all sculp­tures had to be compa­ra­ble in their form, size and ex­pres­sion. Af­ter generating those sculp­tures based upon the particles only, we added time as an under­lying factor. The particle system, which rep­resents a persons inter­ests, spreads in space until it is bal­anced. The speed of this expan­sion, the thickness of the cre­ated hull and the starting point of the drawing process is connected to the factors age, activ­ity and communication behav­ior.

This system leads to an embod­i­ment for the final ~Gestalt of dig­ital identity. A still life of an ongo­ing process about re­defining and dec­orating. This dynam­ic process of dig­ital »day life« is cap­tured in our person­al interpretation of the dig­ital identity as an amorp­hous sculp­ture.
The Process Page says more about how they did it.

Related posts:

1. Personal Anchor on the Web for Digital Identity – CC Images
2. Personal Anchors on the Web for Digital Identities
3. identity of the dead – digital afterlife experiences

The OpenID Foundation and the Information Card Foundation are working with the U.S. General Services Administration to create open trust frameworks for their respective communities.

Drummond Reed and Don Tibeau announced their paper Open Trust Frameworks for Open Government.

Quiet and intense work has been going on since just before the last IIW on all this, so it is great to see it begin to see the light of day.

The OpenID Foundation had a wonderful new redesign that Chris Messina announced. This page really made me smile: Get an OpenID – Surprise! You may already have an OpenID.

Axel did a Wordle of it:

Related posts:

1. FastCo Post on Governemnt Experiments with Identity Technologies
2. Great Workshop
3. Open Identity for Open Government Explained

It got started with this top 10 list put out by the Speakers Group that included NO women. Then O’Reilly published its first round of speakers for Web 2.0 Summit that was only 20% women. Allyson Kapin called him out, started a petition, and a whole discussion got going in Twitter. It continued with the inc500 conference.

This morning via a link I ended up on this website: The IDEAS Project. This is a site talking about the big ideas of the social web and the future of identity, collaboration, standards development, and norms on the digital web. The pictures speak for themselves.

For those of you counting:

• 5 women out of 50
• racial diversity by my observation 2 asian people and 2 black people
• No one under the age of 30 and not that many under the age of 40.

Monitor Talent is behind the site and it is sponsored by Nokia and powered by Xigi.

Many of the men here have written books or have academic credentials.

Of course it is a social media site, so any one can contribute. I just don’t want to contribute to a place that is so skewed in one direction in terms of the starting point. This is not a hard core IT subject, this is social media and use of the web and the network in a forward looking way. Looking along the side, all the contributed ideas so far come from handles with male names.

It all makes me wonder:

• Who is a real “authority” on a subject?
• If you have a title and a position at an institution this means you must know, right?
• If you have written a book you must have it right?

Some friends are in this “talent pool” like Jerry Michalski, Clay Shirky, Doc Searls, Laura Fitton, Christine Heron, Esther Dyson, Bob Fankston, David Hornick, Robert Scoble, Kevin Werbach, Andreas Weigend, Ross Mayfield, Charlene Li, Jeff Clavier.

I am curious if they asked about the gender balance reflected in this project up front?

Have they worked to recommend that Monitor Talent pick up more women talent? or even proactively suggested monitor seek to develop women talent?

The web offers a huge opportunity to change who is seen and referenced as having authority and we need to take advantage of this change the web offers.

I know this… I I have never had a formal position at any company, yet IdM leaders at major companies like Microsoft, SUN, Novell, Burton Group, PayPal, Google, Yahoo!, etc. point at my blog, and I have, at least within that world, a lot of authority as a community leader – I have led 15+ events on the topic of user-centric identity in the past 5 years and and spoken about 3 times a year at other events. I am very very comfortable talking about the topics in my industry, this is what I DO – I am an evangelist, a communicator, but this alone didn’t translate into being able to speak without training, practice or support. (I currently don’t proactively seek to speak because I had a bad experience and it rattled me.)

I think we need to work on moving beyond just taking at face value “old” positional authority like having a title at a university and proclaiming expertise – it doesn’t mean those people participate in the communities that are actually driving the innovation they speak about.

There is a systemic issue here. I hope that it can be addressed by the whole community.

Here are some talented women in identity if you ware wondering who they are.

Related posts:

1. Women in Open Source
2. Women In Tech
3. Are VRM ideas gaining traction?

I thought I should also explain some key things to help understand conventional PAM then get to social web PAM in this post covering:

1. regular identity management in the enterprise,
2. regular Privileged Account Management in the enterprise
3. Privileged Account Management for the Social Web.

1) IdM (Identity Management) in the Enterprise

There are two words you need to know to get IdM and the enterprise: “provisioning” and “termination“.

a) An employee is hired by a company. In order to login to the company’s computer systems to do their work (assuming they are a knowledge worker), they need to be provisioned with an “identity” that they can use to log in to the company systems.

b) When an employee leaves (retires, quits, laid off, fired), the company must terminate this identity in the computer systems so that the employee no longer has access to these systems.

The next thing to understand is logs.

So, an employee uses the company identity to do their work and the company keeps logs of what they do on company systems. This kind of logging is particularly important for things like accounting systems – it is used to audit and check that things are being accurately recorded, and who did what in these systems is monitored, thus addressing fraud with strong accountability.

I will write more about other key words to understand about IdM in the enterprise (authentication, authorization, roles, directories) but I will save these for another post.

2) Ok, so what is Privileged Account Management in the Enterprise?

A privileged account is an “über”-account that has special privileges. It is the root account on a UNIX system, a Windows Administrator account, the owner of a database or router access. These kinds of accounts are required for the systems to function, are used for day-to-day maintenance of systems and can be vital in emergency access scenarios.

They are not “owned” by one person, but are instead co-managed by several administrators. Failure to control access to privileged accounts, knowing who is using the account and when, has led to some of the massive frauds that have occurred in financial systems. Because of this, the auditing of logs of these accounts are now part of compliance mandates in

• Sarbanes-Oxley
• the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS),
• the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC),
• HIPAA.

Privileged Account Management (PAM) tools help enterprises keep track of who is logged into a privileged account at any given time and produce access logs. One way this software works is: an administrator logs in to the PAM software, and it then logs in to the privileged account they want access to. The privileged account management product grants privileged user access to privileged accounts [1].

Links to articles on PAM, [1] Burton Group Identity and Privacy Blog, KuppingerCole, Information Security Magazine.

3) Privileged Account Management on the Social Web.

Increasingly companies have privileged accounts on the social web. Dell computers has several for different purposes. Virgin America, (they link to the account from their website – thus “validating” that this is their real account), JetBlue, Southwest Airlines, Zappos CEO, (employees who twitter), Comcast Cares (Frank Eliason) (interestingly comcast on twitter is blank).

Twitter is just the tip of the iceberg – there are also “fan pages” on Facebook for brands. Coca-Cola, Zappos, NYTimes, Redbull, Southwest, YouTube Channels, Dunkin’ Donuts, etc, etc. on thousands of other platforms and yet-to-be-invented services.

These are very powerful accounts – they are managed and maintained by many employees around the clock and are the public voices of companies.

I have yet to see or hear of any software tools to enable enterprises to manage Social Web privileged accounts. How are companies managing access by multiple employees to these accounts?

Is there software that does this yet?

Is anyone working on these kinds of tools?

Leave your comments here or tweet with me @identitywoman

Related posts:

1. Yet another BaseCamp Account
2. Legal Haze for Social networks. Identity and Freedom of Expression.
3. Higgins opens up