It will be a great opportunity to connect with the people who go to the Internet Identity Workshop coming up May 17-19 in Mountain View.

The workshop attracts industry leaders for 3 full days of intense interactive discussions.  We will have 5 working sessions per-day.  The agenda is created live the day of the event. On our home page you can find the notes from the last three IIW’s along with a list of attendees for each.  For the upcoming workshop a list of proposed topics is developing on the wiki.

This first appeared as a triangle in one of Johannes’ introductory talks at IIW in 2006.

The Liberty identity pillar. This pillar is ready-made for corporate adoption: identity is “given” to the individual by the corporation (e.g. the employer), and it is the corporation that decides which identity attributes are managed and shared with whom. Even if the corporation gives the individual many choices, it is ultimately the corporation who decides whether or not to give those choices to the individual. Typically, Liberty implementation projects are between companies; the individual does not participate directly.

The WS-*-based identity pillar, which, at this juncture, is largely driven by Microsoft. InfoCards is a new “Identity Selector” application that will be bundled, we are told, with every copy of Windows Vista when it ships. It is based on a number of WS-* standards, some WS-* specifications that are expected to become standards at some point, and some Microsoft extensions. As Vista has not shipped yet, there are still many open questions, such as whether it will ever be seriously supported on non-Microsoft operating systems or non-PC devices, or how it could interoperate with non-WS-* based architectures and protocols.

The URL-based identity pillar, which is largely an open-source, grassroots effort. It aims to put the individual fully in control: over identity providers, over attributes, over whether or not to have an identity or how many, over which software to run from which vendor, and over the feature set associated with their identity. Its most visible sign is the use of URLs to point to people, just like we use URLs to point to companies or documents. This pillar is rapidly coming together in the YADIS community, which essentially facilitates an open marketplace of interoperable identity-related features from which the individual may pick as many or as few as they like.

A year later it evolved….

The big differences to the January version are the following:

• The various URL-based technologies (LID, i-names, Yadis, Sxip, XRI, et al) have come together under the OpenID term.
• Microsoft gets a lot of credit for their support of the OSIS project, which brings together most important enterprise software vendors and a number of startups, and thus makes this third column far less Microsoft-controlled than it appeared in January.
• There are various very encouraging signs that the OpenID and SAML/Liberty communities are coming together, allowing the use of SAML in a user-centric manner, which would allow all three columns in a user-centric manner.

This was done in a bit of hurry, so please tell me whether I’m wrong and bear with me if I update it a few times.

Paul Madsen did a sketch and Eve Maler did this electronic version that appeared in her RSA presentations.

The diagram became a Venn

She worked with Drummond on a paper published in the IEEE you can find here.

I highly recommend reading this to “get our industry”

By September 2009 she had refined it further.

It is licensed Creative commons with attribution.

This evolution of shared understanding is part of what it has meant to be a community together figuring out the complexities of supporting people’s identities online.

This slideshow/PDF covers

• Modern Identity History
• Identities 3 Pillars (URL based, Card based and invisible)
• The basic User-Centric Flow
• Kim’s Laws of Identity
• Customer Trust
• A future pointing to project VRM

Enjoy!

It uses the internet archive and text to narrate how the web has evolved from static pages with links to people generated content

These are the lines it closes with.

Digital text is no longer just linking information…

The web is connecting people sharing, trading, collaborating

We need to rethink a few things… copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, asthetics, retorics, governance,  privacy, commerce, love, family, ourselves.

It is the space for this “rethinking” that Identity Commons is meant to support. It is not something that can be figured out by corporations for corporations it must be a wholistic dialogue inclusive of a range of perspectives including the most important actor – the people themselves the end-user.

Here is the Lexicon that got developed on the identity gang list in 2005.

This was not meant to be used to talk with “regular people” but rather this community of specialists to talk about detailed specifics of identity systems.

Agent A computer system or device that has been delegated (authority, responsibility, a function, etc.) by and acts for a Party (in exercising the authority, carrying out the responsibility, performing the function, etc.).

Claim : An assertion made by a Claimant of the value or values of one or more Identity Attributes of a Digital Subject, typically an assertion which is disputed or in doubt.

Claimant: A Digital Subject representing a Party that makes a Claim

Digital Identity: A digital representation of a set of Claims made by one Party about itself or another Digital Subject.

Digital Identity Provider: An Agent that issues a Digital Identity.

Digital Subject: An Entity represented or existing in the digital realm which is being described or dealt with.

Entity: A person, physical object, animal, or juridical entity

Identity Attribute: A property of a Digital Subject that may have zero or more values.

Identity Context: The surrounding environment and circumstances that determine meaning of Digital Identities and the policies and protocols that govern their interactions.

Party: A natural person or a juridical entity.

Persona: A preexisting Digital Identity that a user through an Agent has the ability to select and use to represent themselves in a given Identity Context.

Relying Party: A Party that makes known through its Agent one or more alternative sets of Claims that it desires or requires, and receives through this same Agent a Digital Identity purportedly including the required Claims from a Digital Identity Provider or other Agent of another Party.

The second idea is a one-eyed smiley. As Meng Weng Wong, who conceived of this logo, explained:

In Book 9 of Homer’s Odyssey, a scouting party led by Odysseus lands on the Island of the Cyclopes and discovers a large cave. They enter into the cave and feast on food they find there. This cave is the home of Polyphemus, who soon returns and traps the trespassers in the cave. He proceeds to eat several crew members, but Odysseus devises a cunning plan for escape.

To make Polyphemus unwary, Odysseus gives him a skin of very strong, unwatered wine. When Polyphemus asks for Odysseus’ name, he tells him that it is ‘Outis’, Greek for ‘no man’ or ‘nobody’. Once the giant falls asleep drunk, Odysseus and his men take the spit from the fire and drive it through Polyphemus’ only eye. Polyphemus’ cries of help are answered by the others of his race; however, they turn away from aiding him when they hear that “Nobody” is the cause of his woes.

This being the first recorded case of a security breach due to the lack of an identity management infrastructure, I hope that the Gentle Reader will forgive me for the visual pun: your upside-down umbrella is also a one-i’ed smiley.

As would be expected, this logo emerged from the efforts of several members of our community. Paul Trevithick drove the process and engaged with the designer to produce several iterations. Kaliya Hamlin suggested basing the logo around the upside-down umbrella metaphor. Meng Weng Wong built off of Kaliya’s idea and introduced the Cyclops metaphor.

The Internet Identity Workshop focuses on identity in the large. Providing identity services between people, websites, and organizations that may or may not have any kind of formalized relationship is a different problem than providing authentication and authorization services within a single organization. Many have argued that the lack of a credible identity infrastructure will eventually result in the Internet being so overrun with fraud as to make it useless for many interesting uses.

To solve this problem, or pieces of it, companies and individuals have made a variety of architectural and governance proposals. Some of these include (they are all linked back to the pages viewable in October 2005):

• The Liberty Alliance
• Microsoft’s InfoCard system
• Identity Commons
• SXIP
• OpenIDv1
• LID
• XRI/XDI (i-names)
• Passel

The goal of the Internet Identity Workship is to provide a forum to disucss these and other architectural and governance proposals for Internet-wide identity services and their underlying philosophies. The workshop will comprise a day of presentations on Internet-scale identity architectures followed by a day of structured open space to accommodate the range of topics and issues that will emerge from day one and other issues and identity services that do not fit into the scope of the formal

Day 1 had these presentations

Day 2 we used Open Space Technology to support conversation and innovation amongst the participants that gathered.  There were some topics and papers that were put forward ahead of time as potential topics.

The schedule made live at the event included these sessions

• Definition of Identity
• Attention Data
• Collaborating Together to Compete
• Practical LWA
• YADIS
• HTTP ID Convergence
• Server-less Solutions
• Federation Sucks
• How SXIP Works
• Id Usability
• InfoCard Demo
• ID Commons Value
• Identity Rights Agreements
• InfoCard Discussion

Photos from the first IIW are on Phil’s Blog and Flickr

Blog posts about the event can be found here.

• Ian Glazer – Thoughts on IIW 2005 Day 1
• Brad Fitzpatrick – Thoughts on IIW
• Phil Windley – Day Two Wrap-Up
• Phil Windley – Roadblocks to Ubiquity (before the event)\
• Phil Windley – Attention Data as Identity
• Dick Hardt – Group Hug Day at IIW
• Kaliya Hamlin – Link to cartoon our logo is based on.
• Phil Wainewright – Identity as a Service
• Johannes Ernst – Does Microsoft have an open identity system in mind or one that will be a MSFT one?
• Johannes Ernst - Kim clarifies: Who owns the Metasystem
• Johannes Ernst - Movement in the Personal Digital Identity Market: Announcing YADIS
• Phil Windley – Yet Another Decentralized Identity Interoperability System.

Podcast from IIW Conclusion MP3

From there we met at other conferences including PCForum and the Burton Group.  Doc encouraged many of the community to begin blogging.  We had the first Internet Identity Workshop in 2005 and the 2nd Identity Gang Podcast on January 30th 2005.

Mike Neuenschwander did a presentation at Burton Group Catalyst in 2006 about identity as a commons like, air, water or energy. This was one of the slides he put forward to make his point.


It can’t be “owned” by anyone – it is a commons – it all has to work together using open standards and protocols AND these need to give people (users) usable tools that give them control over how identity information about them is shared. It also has to work for corporations.

Is “identity” the right name for the nature of all the problems that we addressing today in this community? The term social web, open social web etc. have all emerged since the community formed and I think some of the key work that has emerged out of the community has helped inform/form the core components underlying the social web (OpenID, OAuth, etc.). I think we can agree that people and their identities (or should we say identifiers?) along with information about them (data, social graph, attention, activities) are foundational to a social web.

The latest installment of the Internet Identity Workshop #8 in May 2009 brought key companies (Microsoft, Google, Apple, MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo!, AOL, Plaxo) together to get a lot of shared work done solving real problems. This is a commons of huge value to everyone participating, and is worth preserving. I have a post on the IIW blog about how we got to where we are and the bumps in the road to building the culture of the community. There is also a post about cultivation of community that has helped form a common culture.