Identity focus

Focus is good and the last couple of days 'soaking in it' have been immensely valuable.

I wrote a rather scathing rebuttal on Saturday to Marc Cantor's indictment of Digital ID World and subsequent decision that he needed to hang around the halls to participate in the ongoing conversation. I'm sorry in some respects that I thought better of it and put it away. I like Marc; he's deeply involved in many aspects of digital media (and as a result, identity) but I think he's wrong for a number of reasons. Creating new venues to continue the conversation about identity is good; it's a deep subject which should undergo continuous review and evaluation and customer viewpoints need to be constantly brought to the fore. Whining that the next step in the conversation should occur elsewhere is not very helpful (certainly not the week before it starts) and ignores certain realities.

I'm caught in the middle in many respects. Given the choice, our customers would like to just have things work and retain as much anonymity as possible. Would it be useful if we could generate FOAF, Drupal, LID or other lightweight IDs for them (and provide simple editing and control tools)? Seems that way to me. On the other hand, they're also going to want to do things with big online vendors, despite their use of Liberty, SAML, et al. Our customers are only going to care if we screw up and expose data they didn't approve or if we make the process overly difficult (a hard egg to crack). At the same time, I want to be my own identity authority where possible. I'm not convinced that we can't have what Doc would call DIY identity.

DIDW may have a history of being an enterprise conference. I don't know. Having never been before, I have nothing to compare against. Certainly, there are a lot of people here talking about corporate IdM and plenty of sessions to make them happy. That said, the recent sleep cycle on identity seems to be ending and a host of new digital identity related activity is going on. Technology is like that; massive frantic activity and a bit of stagnation as things coalesce. We're on an upswing now and the subject I had trouble getting people to talk about last year is this years buzz. I've had no problem finding sessions of interest and people I needed to talk to to get a better picture of the entire spectrum of digital identity. Outside of yesterdays identity gang meeting I found time to corner Johannes Ernst and work through the issues I believed could be a problem for us with LID, ambush Drummond Reed (and numerous others like Bill Washburn and Andy Dale) getting a get much better understanding of XRI/XDI, and tie Dick Hardt to a chair for nearly an hour to help clarify many of my misconceptions and add many things I'd missed about Sxip. We also spent some time with the PingID folks to get a better idea of where they're at and how that could fit into our bigger picture.

I came to focus on identity and it seems to be paying dividends. That the customer focused discussion on identity happened on Monday before the conference actually opened and I managed to wrangle an invite (thanks Doc!) was even better (some have said it's half the conference). Not being a conference trotter, I feel this was a really good choice for a week of my time. If we're to get to Dick's Identity 2.0 vision statement (a fifteen minute, 300+ slide presentation; I wish everyone could see the first five minutes or so of Id 1.0 recap), a lot of things are going to need to change including DIDW. Perhaps that's begun and as Kim cautions, we need to add to the momentum that's already been built.