Cook’s Collaborative Edge

Johannes Ernst wrote on my mailist on April 1 in response to my questions about the attacks on Kathy Sierra with respect to issues of online identoity:

there are many others, from intellectual property policies to national vs. international scopes, from individual empowerment to the need “to catch the terrorists”, from trustability of many kinds of technology and the processes used to produce it to a rethink of some supposedly well-established political traditions.

The difficulty in “identity” is that
1) it has so many parts
2) nobody agrees what they are
3) in fact, maybe nobody has even successfully enumerated them. (my suspicion, and myself included …)

So it’s not surprising one can spend years discussing identity without making any particular progress whatsoever and feeling more confused at the end than at the beginning.

What I’d suggest is to follow the approach taken by a number of practitioners in the field, which is to agree on some very basic and simple things that are going to be needed regardless where all of this goes, and what we may or may not agree on, and *put them in practice* as broadly as possible. Then check whether or not reality conforms to expectation, what the actual implications are as evidenced by usage (or non-usage), and then take the next very basic and simple things that are going to be needed. Eventually we’ll get there without too many failed grand designs …

I’d also like to suggest that the idea of letting people grab one or more URLs of their choosing as their identifier and the ability to prove that they are the rightful owner, now commonly referred to as OpenID, is one of those basic and simple things. It is a tiny fraction of the ecosystem that will evolve — including many other things that are not technology — but as the now 80 million or so existing OpenIDs show, it can’t be that wrong …

COOK’s Edge: Meanwhile over at Confused of Calcutta, JP Rangaswami was saying:

When I speak to people about identity, many of the responses go very quickly into detail about federated models and use of microformats and OpenID and and and. This is great, because we clearly have a community talking about standards and fashioning them via usage — trying them out — rather than abusage — pontificating in front of slideware.

As I said, this is great. So what’s the problem? The problem is that it’s a small community. We aren’t going to solve this issue unless we have a somewhat larger number of people truly engaged. One way of engaging people is to keep raising awareness of what identity is about.

COOK’s Edge: JP then lists 6 different posible kinds of identity. Please take a look My next post depends on readers having seen them.

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