schmoozy space Mark Szpakowski's szpace blog

I just returned from the Internet Identity Workshop (love the logo!) held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. About 140 people attended, including most of the Open Source players in this field: a bunch of really bright people with heart. The conference was done in Open Space Technology style, with Identity Woman (Kaliya Hamlin) doing a great job of holding the space. We broke up into small groups for presentations and discussions, most of which were high quality, and then re-forming into the whole: systole/diastole.

This may turn out to have been a landmark event in internet history. Why? Because it signals the need for, and ways to achieve, user-centric identity, which can both help solve a number of problems (I've got to manage dozens of userIDs and passwords; my blog comments get spammed; I've got to fill yet another form on this web site) and enable new capabilities (I can put together my personal mosaic (dare I use the mashup word?) of the web people and sites I care about, stitched together through my secure active identity).

Up to now it is the sites that I deal with that give me identities, and extract information about me. We are regarded as eyeballs to be information-mined (remember the Cluetrain Manifesto, Doc Searls noted). It's long past overdue to flip this around (with attempts to do this starting with Novell's DigitalME in the late nineties, but see the Identity Space Map for more), so that the user, the person, is in control of their own identity and the profiles exposed to others, whether they be persons, person-proxies such as weblogs, or web sites offering services. Flipping this around is a bit like moving an ocean, but perhaps we've set the moon in motion to produce a sea change.