View source for 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)


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