My brain is coming out of my ears at the moment. Mostly I'm in awe of the people and the thinking I'm tripping over in various investigations.
Firstly, I'm looking at our mantra of the digital social network. So, thanks to Ben Hammersley, I come across Peter Morville's lovely analysis. This in turn leads me to Bonnie, and specifically I find the word nanotechnology on her page, which makes me think of Matt Jones who I know is obsessed with the stuff. Like his dog.
It's all so simple really. As Peter, amongst others, says neatly, we use people to find content, and content to find people.
People don't want to be bored, they want company, they want stimulation, and they want it in easy ways. Multiple ways, too. Sod convergence, more experimentation!
Now where to...
For the first time in 3 days I think we finally feel part of this party :)
one for the fingerprint team:
"having it done to you is intrusive - but doing it for yourself is empowering"
So of course on the last day, finally someone starts talking about the real crux of this problem, which isn't technical. It's social.
And it's Doc.
First, read the cool priest's summary of what doc is doing right now.. and focus on the point that digiID needs to mother necessity here. Why would folk want an identity? Let's ignore the whole federal / state / national IDENTITY thing going on, because no-one's really interested in that so much beyond the guys who are struggling with the tech solution. Let's have a think about what BBCi can do to create identity value in the UK.
How about a Yellow Pages of characters? A People listing, categorised by "humanoid" titles and subtitles (like, "Cynic" instead of "Plumber")? Would being listed in the UK online PeoplePages be of value to people? It's not an original idea but it's perhaps an idea that's not been done properly yet? The glue could be the content. We had a big chat over dinner last night with an american Doctor Who fan.... = connection.
Consider things like that. Social solutions to what people want on a day to day basis = human contact. Thoughts?
Oh, and.. Doc's telling stories, people are laughing, this is a fun presentation! There's Matt Jones right up there on the screen, part of the show.
Apologies for bad writing, am blogging while listening and watching out of one eye...
xx
Ant here...
Just went to a really interesting presentation on business models surrounding the concept of 'federation'
Federation in a nutshell: A company or consortium of companies holding a central user database for use in authenticating users accross multiple different services and organisations.
There seems to be an assumption that federation, for the most part, aspires to be based on the Visa card or Mastercard model where a central authorising body coordinates a bunch of transactions between a consumer, a merchant, a consumers bank and a merchants bank. The identity federator(s) aspire to perform this role, presumably for a profit as most businesses aren't terribly altruistic (money makes the world go round, the world go round... especially in the American world). Passport, Liberty Alliance and the like are working to this assumption however, as Carole Coye Benson pointed out, there is a fundamental flaw in the idea of using the Visa/Mastercard model. There's a massive incentive for merchants and consumer's banks to support it - PROFIT and a lot of it!
There's no money in supporting federated identity and so, why subscribe to it? I can't really see organisations spending money on implementing infrastructure for it when there's nothing in it for them except a warm fuzzy that they've made the user experience world a better place. For that matter, why would users spend money on a federated digital identity? (nobody else is going to pay for it are they?).
So, where's that leave us? The BBC is in a particularly strong position to initiate federation but perhaps just jumping on the bandwagon as we are want to do, isn't the answer here. I've no solutions I'm afraid, but I do have a few ideas proposed by Carole which are worth considering. Have a look at the credit bureau model where a third party monitors the financial activity of people. It doesn't require registration persé [sp?]. This system is based on two fundamentals which are particularly good for comparing to the digital identity paradigm, which are history of activity under one identity and the behaviour of that person over that period. Hmmm... food for thought.
Speaking of which, I'm off to dinner so it's goodnight from him, and it's goodnight from me. :-)
Guess who drew the short straw and got the 2 hour session?
One thing they've got going is that they want to hand control back the the user.
There are liberty enabled products coming soon "it's in their roadmaps" "you are going to see things happening in the space" ... but the question still remains ... when will users start using it?
Liberty Version 2 expected early 2003: Permission based attribute sharing; interoperability specs for core identity profile service; federation of authentication domains. But we can't be told anything else because they have NDA's!
There's a lot of interaction scenario's but they are focused on technology (again) and not the customer. Odd. Again, who's going to use this? Will Mandy get it - i think not somehow ... but i'd love to be proved wrong :-)
Ok, I'm way outa my league on this one ... but something I was thinking about on the tube last week and now i'm sitting infront of a panel talking about just this ... isn't a unique id just like a domain?
But they may as well be talking dutch ...
so my mind wanders:
There's a semi-big blogger community here and they all have their own blogg which tells us something about them as an individual. And each of these folk have thier own domain .. and in some cases, these people are better known by their blogg than their real name. mmmm....
WHOIS.
Seems these issue around unique identity etc.. are not new. Perhaps we're missing a key learning from somewhere?
Esther say on the issue os spam: privacy and spam are two seperate things - here are good technological solutions for spam .... but there's little technology that addresses privacy.
Someone else asked: "icann is doing everything possible to make sure the end user has no say - what do we do about goverance when they are determined to take the control away from the user?"
For the first time in 11 hours of conferencing someone has mentioned interactive television... well, TIVO. But it's close enough for me!
The thought that keeps Martha [Martha Rogers, Ph.D] awake at night is where is the line of privacy when you watch the box ... but the box is really watching you!
"TIVO are not in the TV business, they are in the information business"
Martha talks a lot about the relationship and the interaction between the customer and the business ... and how this can lend itself towards a learning relationship.
But my thought to her was: What about what we can learn from customers connecting with each other. We have an invite to come and talk to them at Peppers & Rogers Group when we get back to London.
btw - this is my second ever blogg entry... will the bug bite? we'll see...
MSN8 is a very scary product indeed. It's AOL, worse even. It has parental controls that seemingly allow parents to completely monitor their child's surfing history, including sites visited, people talked to, and content of messages. What rights does or should a child have? What would Childnet, or Childline think of that? What kind of parents would want to invade their child's privacy to that degree? How MANY parents would want to invade said privacy to that degree? If a child get into trouble with a parent as a result of this big brother surveillance, what will their actions be in the future?
Canada is currently putting a national identity card system into place.
The USA is considering one.
Trusted hardware, and use of biometric authentication systems (sometimes in tandem with other ID systems), is being encouraged by Msoft et al. How do portable identity devices look?
The Project Fingerprint password-sense-check is now being put into place by MSN8. Well done, Fingerprint team! You got somewhere faster than Microsoft! :)
Even at a tech conference like this, the distribution of PC - Mac seems to be higher than national average, with a guess at 70-30, maybe even 60 - 40. LOTS of titaniums. Showing off style, or a geniune shift away from Windows?
Doc is blogging this conference to his usual fantastic standard.
An entity that is hard to use is deemed LESS trustworthy than something easy to use.
Trust is King...
So, here we are. I'm sitting at the back of the room (orders, if you have a laptop, speakers don't like the tapping..) listening to Esther Dyson open up today's session, "Who owns your information?".
I'll summarise what we've found so far. It's Day Two, and yesterday was more or less entirely technologically skewed. It was good, interesting, the best bit was that we've clearly done our homework so there was little there that was a shock or new as such... but we couldn't help but feel that in fact what's going on here is this (guesstimates): the conference is mostly US folk, probably 60-40 vendor-purchaser, and again I'd say that at least 40% of the people here already know each other. There are a total of 250 people here.
It's tiny. It's huge, while tiny - the first conference on Digital Identity, and everyone agrees that Digital Identity is a behemoth, the next internet standard, currently missing, that needs to be established. "Identity is the central thread that will enable security, control, manageability and accountability in a fully distributed network". Yet only 250 people! It's fascinating. Everyone's talking protocols, and SAML, distribution, security, PKI, authentication, biometrics. They're the brains of the method, the folk who will figure out how the hell you get to a global industry standard (open source seems to already be the nod of the heads), that will ensure the user owns their data..
but no-one so far is thinking beyond that instance of the user.
What about representation? The psychology, the sociology, the physiology of the digital identity? That's what I'm hoping someone'll start mentioning soon. If not, we'll have to bring it in next year :)
The other key thing is amusing. Everyone, but everyone we've spoken to, asks the same question: "So, like, why is the BBC here?".
Out here, the BBC is definitely still just a broadcaster. Within the same question, one guy moved smoothly onto the merits of Blackadder.. I'd bet he's never heard of BBCi. So, we've been doing some educating. The organisers asked Lorna if we'd like to maybe talk about interactive TV, as they really aren't covering it at all here, nor even necessarily thinking about it. Once told about it, they get 'Connect' completely. Instantly. They're pretty fascinated about the UK industry, and you can see the neurons working. For instance.. from the Open Source and Identity panel, we got “Can there ever be a trusted, central ‘holder’ of Digital ID that isn’t the government?”. From Trusted Computing, we get the statistic that 84% of US folk polled would pay 25 dollars for ‘trusted identity storage”.
Trust is something that people here are regarding as the holy grail.Thought-provoking for us, hm?
Over and out, the only other person here under 30 (ahem) is on the stage.
