In Context

Fascinating to dive into the IndiWeb community, their aspirations and principles. So many echos and similarities from earlier technologies.

Markus Sabadello made a great point that the marriage of the IndieWeb with Johannes’ IndieBox (FreedomBox, etc.) is a powerful combination.

I’m listening to Ben Werdmuller riff about how he thinks standards should be developed using an incremental, agile approach with an open hacker-oriented community.

To get started read indiewebify.me. A new startup currently called idno.co (comprised of Erin Jo Richey erinjorichey.com and Ben Werdmuller) will create this as a one-click tool (based on PHP, MySQL).

I wanted to express my gratitude for Steve. Not for all the things that the worlds knows, but for a couple of things that he did for me personally.

The first was in the early 90′s when Steve was at NeXT. My startup at the time had some ideas about how to help make the NeXT machine’s operating system better even than a Mac for electronic publishing application. We went to visit Steve to ask for some funding. I explained our ideas and situation and what we could do for NeXT. He like what he heard, but said that in his view the best software was written by starving software developers in garages and that providing funding to them would distort their values. Or something to that effect. Starving we were. But then he did something truly generous. He loaned us 14 new NeXT machines (at about $10k each) to help us, and then never asked for them back. I can’t tell you what this meant to us and to me.

The second was after he was back at Apple in the late 90′s. I found that Steve, despite being CEO, always had time to meet with me about new ideas. He even made time for a fellow developer, Michael Hoffman, when I asked Steve if we could come to One Infinite Loop and meet with him so Michael could present some cool new ideas to improve the Mac Finder. I think one of Steve’s greatest strengths was his ability to recognize talent and attract it. I guess making time for new people and ideas was part of his greatness.

On both counts, and all the better known ones, I’m indebted to Steve.

For the past year a bunch of us in the ULX working group at Kantara has been working on the UX challenge of cross-protocol login UX. The idea was to design a user interface that mere mortals could use to login irrespective of underlying protocol. The reality is that users don’t care whether it is OpenID, i-cards, SAML (or even Facebook Connect) or anything else under the hood. They just want it to work. So we asked ourselves why can’t there be a common UX that’s easy to use. So…without further ado…

Click the “v4″ link here and experience a ULX-powered website!

We’ve not yet mocked up what happens AFTER you have an active client installed. In other words the mockup assumes an unmodified browser. But before we continue we wanted to show what we’ve got and get some reactions.

On the morning of July 5th I had breakfast with Iain Henderson and David Alexander of Mydex. And then, within 5 minutes of walking in to the IoS meeting I met Serge, Sampo and Graham. Between meeting them on the one hand and the breakfast on the other I knew the whole trip was worthwhile. It’s a great pleasure to spend time with people who share the vision of giving individuals more control over their own personal data. We all had a chance to share what we’re all learning about creating Personal Data Stores, VRM (TRM?), user managed identity, data portability, etc.

Check out Internet of Subjects. This is a new effort that deserves our support. I particularly like the fact that it’s not based in the (privacy-challenged) US. The effort is being indirectly supported by EU investments in TAS3, a project that I’m only now learning about.

Here’s a quote from Graham Sadd’s post about the IoS meeting:

Serge Ravet, CEO of EIfEL, prefaced the Eifel Learning Forum with the inaugural Internet of Subjects Forum to an international audience in London yesterday. The plenary presentations were made by Sampo Kellomaki, Chief Architect at Symlabs, Graham Sadd, Founder & CEO of PAOGA (read interview) and Paul Trevithick – Founder of Higgins Project and CEO of Azigo.

RPs are the most important actors. Open identity technologies (OpenID, Infocard, SAML, etc.) will only succeed as websites and apps (aka Relying Parties) adopt them. And since by definition the concept of open identity involves reuse of existing accounts from external identity providers, there will always be more RPs than providers.

RP developers aren’t identity experts we need to create libraries and web services to make it as easy as possible for them to implement all this stuff. This has been widely recognized. But another factor in making open identity tech RP-friendly is to make sure that these libraries, etc. support the semantics that are natural from the RP’s point of view.

What RPs want. An RP wants to rely on some attributes from an external source. Sometimes they only want a single identifier attribute (e.g. Google OpenID)). Sometimes they want more (e.g. the institution that you are a student of, etc.).

Of course the authority asserting the attribute is also important. But this varies by attribute. For example, an RP site may be perfectly fine letting the user self-assert a “ship to” address, or asserting an email address to send a confirmation to. Whereas they’d like a third party like the city fire department to be the provider of an attribute that states that this user a registered fireman and thus should be allowed have access to a federal first responder portal.

Attribute request semantics. If this is what RPs want, then they should be able to express their desires in a natural way. A list of attributes with some extra fields would seem to make sense. How about a list of attribute request tuples each of which holds:

• Attribute – e.g. email, age > 21, GPS location, first name, employer…
• Optional – true if the RP requires  v.s desires this attribute
• Authorities – list of authorities that the RP trusts for this attribute (if nil, then self-asserted data by the user is fine). This is essentially the RP’s white list.

Mismatch. Do OpenID, Infocard etc. allow the above semantics to be expressed? The short answer is no. In essense, we can’t express things from the point of view of the RP.

Moving forward. The attributes first principle has grown out of a growing recognition of the critical role RPs play in the adoption of open identity technology. It now influences my thinking about RP identity infrastructure, and is being incorporated into our thinking about “next gen” selectors.

Nat has started a blog post on this topic here. Back when the Identity Gang was young I used to spend a lot of time on this definitional work as editor of the Identity Commons Lexicon. A topic near and dear to my heart. I particularly Nat’s image:

Identity in Context

It properly captures the contextual nature of identity. Maybe underplays it a little.