User-Centric Digital Identity Movement

Description

"User-Centric Digital Identity concerns having control over one's identity; citizens groups have the freedom to organize and connect, they have freedom of expression, freedom to not identify or to have persistent pseudonymous identifiers ... User-centric digital identity is super key to distributed alternative currencies having a platform." (Kaliya Hamlin)

History

Kaliya Hamlin:

"I have been committed to making the vision of User-Centric digital identity since 2003 - really committed, to the core of my being (those who "know" me on this list can attest to this).

What is that vision - one where people in the online space have the same kinds of freedom and autonomy in online spaces that they do in offline spaces.

That the whole internet does not become a "shopping mall" where the owner can control the types of speech aloud in the controlled "public square" in that space - where as we have freedom of assembly on the streets and the right to be anonymous on that speech.

Where citizen identities are not controlled by corporate TOS's and EULA's (they are if you have your primary "home for your identity on the web in Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google, Yahoo etc).

They can erase you. They can define acceptable speach and iconography.

Facebook banned marijuana leaves as group logos. SO this issue - the legalization of this substance is ON ballot measures in California. It is a public freedom of speech and expression issue.

Gay film makers apparently are having their activity curtailed.

As an aside: Twitter gets huge points for standing up to the Wikileaks subpoena. I imaging google and Facebook got similar ones and just caved.

So User-Centric ID. That i have control of my identity on the web, That citizens groups have the freedom to organize and connect, they have freedom of expression, freedom to not identify or to have persistent pseudonymous identifiers.

The US government on Friday put out this document - http://www.nist.gov/nstic

I am quoted here - http://www.nist.gov/nstic/what-others-are-saying.html

When I started working on user-centric identity is was like 15 people in the corner of the 2004 Digital Identity World (an enterprise identity management conference) talking in "dreamy" ways about something that might happen. We started a list - and people started synchronizing their vocabularly That is calling the same things by the same names - so they could talk about differences coherently. The lexicon was driven by Paul Trevithick http://wiki.idcommons.net/Lexicon

This was needed cause people had been thinking about the same concepts BUT in isolation from each other - either literally "alone" or with a few others .... so this larger group began to form and there were 3-4 different terms for the same "thing" ... so converging vocab happened.

Then the conversation about how to understand the perspectives happened - building shared understanding....

out of this grew shared meaning and THEN shared action.

So the - this isn't to say starting the mailing list was the "action" - the list and subsequent meetings the community went through these phases listed above. We are still in shared action :) the announcement friday being the lastest manifestation of that.

We started a mailing list - to continue talking and others found us. Doc Searls convinced many of us to start blogs to share our thoughts - more people found the community - it grew. We had our first "identity gang" podcast on Dec 31, 2004. Phil Windley talked about a conference in the spring...instead we met at other people's conferences... in like 3 hour meetings the day before - it became clear that we needed our own conference.

Phil and I (and Doc) organized IIW1 in the fall of 2005. 85 people came.

We have had the meeting every 6 months since then - number 12 is happening in May. There have been quite a few other off shoot conferences (data sharing summits for examples) and relatively large community meetings at RSA, DIDW and Burton Group Catalyst conferences for the last 5 years.

This community has deep relationships formed over time of working together, learning together, partying in San Francisco together, going through loss together (2 community members have died), being inspired by big visions together, being heart broken by lack of adoption of our technologies...."

(NextNet mailing list, April 2011)