Date: Thur, 22 June 2006 00:22:00 -0600
From: SuitWatch 
To: suitwatch@ssc.com
Subject: SuitWatch - June 22



                            SuitWatch -- June 22


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  Mashup Wrapup

   I'm writing this from the cavernous downstairs at the MIT Media Lab in
   Cambridge, Massachusetts, where we are nearing the end of the third and last
   day of the Identity Mashup conference put on by Harvard's Berkman Center for
   Internet and Society. The first two days' sessions were held at Harvard
   Law School http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/ (out of which Berkman grew).
   The third was held here.

   Forward movement has been tectonic. Just like it was at the last Berkman
   identity event, earlier this year. And at the Internet Identity Workshops
   (IIWs) http://iiw.windley.com/wiki/Main_Page held in the Bay Area last
   October and this May.

   Things have not always moved so fast.

   That's what I expected back in 2002, when Andre Durand, one of the fathers
   of the Jabber/XMPP movement, told me that identity was personal -- and that
   personal control was a huge piece missing from all the identities (mostly in
   the form of cards) that we receive from credit card companies and other
   outside parties. Andre painted a vision of a networked marketplace in which
   individuals held the most important cards -- namely their own -- which they
   would use to interact more efficiently with businesses, and to establish a
   new balance of market power that favored customers for the first time since
   the dawn of the Industrial Age.

   I got on board right away; but the bandwagon turned out to be more like a
   wheelbarrow. For the next two years I spoke often and earnestly on the
   inevitability of a future business world in which "user-centric identity"
   would change everything. While almost nothing actually happened.

   Then, at the Fall 2004 Digital ID World, I pushed a number of like-minded
   folks in a converging direction. Could be there was a gravitational
   attraction in any case, but I like to think that I helped move things along
   a bit.

   Especially when Steve Gillmor and I convened The Identity Gang
   http://identitygang.org/ -- a group of user-centric identity figures -- for
   the Gillmor Gang podcast on December 31, 2004
   http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail394.html . A conversational
   snowball started rolling, and it has since increased enormously in size and
   importance.

   But not in formality. The Identity Gang http://identitygang.org/ is open
   to anybody with anything to contribute to the conversation - or to the
   assortment of code bases that comprise a converging array of solutions to
   different, related and overlapping identity problems.

   All those code bases share a single central concern: the individual. Known
   variously as "individual-centered identity", "identity 2.o" and "independent
   identity" - among many other labels - Identity Gang members' common
   perspective is outward toward markets, and toward relationships of all
   kinds, from the perspective of the independent individual.

   This is new. In the past, most -- if not all -- identity solutions came from
   business, government, standards bodies and other institutional sources, and
   shared those sources' top-down perspective toward individuals. We see this
   perspective behind every plastic card in our wallets that carries our name.
   In every case, our identity is organizationally peripheral (if not also
   subordinate) to the organization that identifies us -- whether that
   organization is the DMV, the credit card company, the city library, or the
   local Y. Even some identity standards development efforts, such as the
   Liberty Alliance and the WS-Federation, are projects launched by and for
   large companies. These efforts were highly respectful of individuals from
   the beginning, and necessarily cover large areas of the growing identity
   solution map; but they do not come from individuals.

   All the efforts developed by Identity Gang members -- ranging in scale from
   Brad Fitzpatrick's OpenID http://openid.net/ (created for Live Journal
   blogs) to Microsoft's InfoCard (created for Vista, but due to be released
   for XP) were zero-based around individuals and their sovereign identity
   needs in the networked marketplace. (Kim and Microsoft's remarkably
   open-oriented efforts were visited at length in Independent Identity, in
   last September's issue of Linux Journal.)

   From the beginning, open and encompassing concepts for identity solution
   interoperability and convergence have also been no less important than the
   code development those concepts have guided. These include Kim Cameron's
   Laws of Identity and Identity Metasystem construct, Dick Hardt's Identity
   2.o, Drummond Reed's dataweb, my own Intention Economy -- and others I
   insult by forgetting right now.

   From its beginnings, the Identity Gang and its friends have been doing their
   best to keep their separate development projects as open and mash-able as
   possible. These efforts have been encouraging, to say the least. In the
   first Internet Identity Workshop (IIW)
   http://www.eclab.byu.edu/workshops/iiw2005/announcement.html , held this
   past October in Berkeley, OpenID, LID and XRI/XDI
   http://www.xns.org/xri-and-xdi-explained.html (i-names) mashed up Yadis
   http://yadis.org/wiki/Main_Page (a simple URL-based "Identity and
   accountability foundation for Web 2.o.") from parts of their own separate
   development efforts. Still, as Johannes Ernst of LID
   http://lid.netmesh.org/wiki/Main_Page put it this afternoon, "we could see
   we were stepping on each other's toes". And a concerted effort was made to
   stop doing that.

   The second IIW http://www.windley.com/events/iiw2006a/announcement.shtml
   , held last month in Mountain View, saw the first open source implementation
   of Microsoft's InfoCard, by the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
   It also saw Identity Gang members from the IETF, Red Hat, Verisign, Novell,
   SXIP, Tucows, LID, Linux Journal and other organizations meet with Kim
   Cameron and Mike Jones of Microsoft to talk about working compatibly with
   InfoCard, and launching both commercial and open source InfoCard-compatble
   development projects. Now there are weekly OSIS (Open Source Identity
   Selector) conference calls, each intended to keep independent developments
   both open and mash-able.

   And that was just one among many mash-worthy efforts that snowballed at the
   Workshop.

   The Berkman Center became involved with the Identity Gang at Esther Dyson's
   PC Forum in March 2005, when Senior Fellow John Clippinger
   http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/john_clippinger joined the gang's meetings
   there, and volunteered the center as a virtual "clubhouse". Not long after
   that, Paul Trevithick - John's colleague at Social Physics
   http://www.socialphysics.org/ - launched the Identity Gang wiki.

   The Identity Mashup is the second identity event hosted by the Berkman
   Center. The first was a workshop on user-centric identity and commerce held
   in February. As with every other Identity Gang gathering, there was
   tremendous progress there. For example, this was where Paul Trevithick
   introduced the Higgins framework for integrating identity-related
   information across heterogeneous systems.

   I don't know where to begin listing all the tectonic movements that happened
   here in the last three days. And I don't have time. My plane leaves shortly,
   and I need to get this out to the newsmill for mailing.

   So I'll point to a posting by Johnannes Ernst, about OSIS:
   http://netmesh.info/jernst/NetMesh/announcing-osis-zdnet.html.

   The next IIW will be in November. I expect to see more of ya'll there.

   Meanwhile, I'll have a lot more to report about the whole workshop when I
   get back home on Monday. Watch the Linux Journal website for that.

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