As some of you know, I am a fan of Larry Lessig‘s presentation style. One of the many speakers who has been insired by that style is Dick Hardt, but I am not talking about his presentation style, but rather his content. Dick is into identity, what he calls identity 2.0. I was reminded of his talk by Neil’s post on OpenID. As someone who has a strong presence on the web and an offline identity, the question of how we attribute identity is very important to me and it’s pretty clear that despite the efforts of many we have not come anywhere close to achieving a viable identity system.
I have a name, a job, an addres, a passport, resident status, and citizenship. Those are some of the forms of identity for which pin down who I am at least in the traditional view of the world. There is a system in place that establishes my identity. It may be suboptimal, especially in the electronic age, but it works most of the time. But what about my general identity, especially one defined by online presence.
I am a scientist who has published papers, a business developer at Amazon Web Services, have a flickr account, am active on friendfeed, etc. You can reconcile my scientific identity using something like ResearcherID, my online identity using OpenID, but how do you integrate all these identities and match them with my legal identity? Who are the trust brokers and why? How do I control how much of my identity-related information is provided to identity consumers and how can this scale?
Those are questions that I have yet to find satisfactory answers to. Dick has some great ideas, but in the years since he gave his keynote at OSCON, the world has not really progressed on this question. Rather it’s become a lot more fragmented.
Identity-fication
As some of you know, I am a fan of Larry Lessig‘s presentation style. One of the many speakers who has been insired by that style is Dick Hardt, but I am not talking about his presentation style, but rather his content. Dick is into identity, what he calls identity 2.0. I was reminded of his talk by Neil’s post on OpenID. As someone who has a strong presence on the web and an offline identity, the question of how we attribute identity is very important to me and it’s pretty clear that despite the efforts of many we have not come anywhere close to achieving a viable identity system.
Using some of Dick’s logic, who am I?
I have a name, a job, an addres, a passport, resident status, and citizenship. Those are some of the forms of identity for which pin down who I am at least in the traditional view of the world. There is a system in place that establishes my identity. It may be suboptimal, especially in the electronic age, but it works most of the time. But what about my general identity, especially one defined by online presence.
I am a scientist who has published papers, a business developer at Amazon Web Services, have a flickr account, am active on friendfeed, etc. You can reconcile my scientific identity using something like ResearcherID, my online identity using OpenID, but how do you integrate all these identities and match them with my legal identity? Who are the trust brokers and why? How do I control how much of my identity-related information is provided to identity consumers and how can this scale?
Those are questions that I have yet to find satisfactory answers to. Dick has some great ideas, but in the years since he gave his keynote at OSCON, the world has not really progressed on this question. Rather it’s become a lot more fragmented.
Oh and watch his talk. As Larry Lessig says
Related articles by Zemanta