In Context

I gave this talk entitled Towards an eCitizen at a very stimulating conference Jan 15th at the MIT Media Lab. It was organized by Dazza Greenwood, Bruce Bakis (MITRE) and others associated with the eCitizenFoundation.

I tried to motivate why we needed trusted user [identity] agents, multiple, contextual identities, selective disclosure, etc. by trying to answer the question “why can’t dogs vote?”

It was great fun. Mary Ruddy and Charles Andres did demos of registered voter Information Cards being issued by CivicID.org and consumed by BigDialog.org.

Here’s the press release from Eclipse. We’ve been getting lots of congratulations from friends. Which feels great. Thanks to all of you.

The next trick will be building awareness and adoption. When you consider that 0% of all websites (or enterprise apps) accept i-cards or OpenID, and 0% of sites issue cards, it’s small wonder that 0% of users today even know what an identity selector is. We’ve got our work cut out for us!

Being eternally optimistic, I think it is only a matter of time before we people start using identity selectors to:

• log in to websites (instead of remembering passwords)
• manage their relationships with friends (instead of being captive to any one social network or tool)
• manage their relationships with vendors (instead of being “managed” by the vendors — CRM)
• manage their relationships with government agencies and healthcare providers
• fill in forms automatically (instead of being asked for the 18,446th time “First name:______”)
• share preferences, interests and passion for causes and brands
• discover like-minded people…

Oh, and do all of this across the web, across silos, and out from under Facebook’s terms of service!

I think people will come to understand that they have rights in their own identity information. They’ll even eventually see that most advertising “flow” can be reversed because their own preferences, needs, affiliations, history and interests are worth gold to brands, merchants and service providers.

…back to work. 1.0.1 beckons!

[Related blog links: Ian Skerrett, Nishant Kaushik, Mike Jones, Pam Dingle]

If you’d like to join the cloudtripper.org conversation, click here. We’ve also got the source code to some of the demo posted to the site. More to come.

There was a well attended session on the Higgins Data Model at the data sharing summit. I presented some slides that I’ve since cleaned it up a bit here (PPT) and a great discussion.

My favorite question was from Andy Dale who pointed out that I shouldn’t be drawing Digital Subjects in two different colors (depending on whether they were, loosely speaking, about “you” vs. being about “someone else”) since in truth all “things/people” are represented by one class, namely Digital Subject, and that the only thing that differentiates them is whether they are linked by “SubjectRelation” or “SubjectCorrelation” links (links to friends, etc. vs. links to other representations (facets) of the entity known as “you”.

Marc Canter was clearly uncomfortable with the lingo that the data model uses. It’s based on the Lexicon developed during an intense 18 month period of peer co-production on the identity gang list. That project leveraged earlier work by Kim Cameron, SAML, and many others. Marc may be unfamiliar with that work. Here’s a mapping that might help apply the more generic Higgins/IdGang lingo to Marc’s world:

• A node in a social graph = Digital Subject
• An edge in a social graph = a SubjectRelation or a SubjectCorrelation (see above). Kinds of Identity Attributes
• A profile as commonly used = the set of Identity Attributes of a Digital Sujbect minus the SubjectCo/Relations

I can’t think of a better way to kick of a new blog than to post about this weekend’s data sharing summit. There were folks from big sites like AOL, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft as well as lots of small cool sites Pownce, RapLeaf, and lots more. Though Marc had planned it for a while, the buzz just before the meeting around Brad’s thoughts on the social graph couldn’t have come at a better time. Facilitated in open space by Kaliya, who as usual did a wonderful job, the meeting was a chance to kick around a topic that I’ve been passionate about for years. The original question I asked myself in 2003 was, how could I merge the social sub-graphs of which I was a member into one unified graph so I could see it all in one place? So I couldn’t have been more excited to go, and I wasn’t disappointed.

For my colleagues Drummond and Markus Sabadello and I who attended with me it was a chance to:

1. Launch a new community site, cloudtripper.org, focused on this area
2. Demo some code that we’ll post to cloudtripper.org (as soon as we get SVN up!) that showed how we can access using a common API data from both Facebook and an OpenID OP service.
3. Demo the new Community Dictionary Service (CDS) that we’ve put up as a live (though experimental) service at http://cds.idschemas.idcommons.net