Day 1: Internet Identity Conference

The Internet Identity Conference kicked off today at 1pm at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.  The workshop started pretty much on time with intros by the organizers: Kaylia and Phil and then an intro to identity commons by Eugene Kim. Then Kaylia put us into groups to talk about and ask the questions we came with. She numbered us off in sets of 15 and then we all played musical chairs. I ended up in 10 - which included Eve Maler (Sun), Mike Jones (MS Cardspace), Phil Windley (!), Mark Lentczer (2nd Life), Joe Steel (Adobe), Matthew Sploin (Resilient - a trust network for moving medical records) and Jim Fenton from Cisco. They were a great group of people and we had a very interesting discussion. We went around the group talking about our reasons for attending:

• Learn the technology
• Do right by the consumer
• Building Bridges
• Enabling Convergence
• Curious about e-commerce
• Understanding which is the right system I should impliment
• How to make money? How and who makes money? Who pays?
• Personas identity: separation or integrated
• Technology: separated or integrated (solution vs how to)
• PKI trust

Then we distilled out a couple questions to share with the larger group (money, personas, technology) and Kaylia went around the room each group sharing their distilled questions. She created a kind of mind map of the answers and that, I supposed, will drive the sessions the next two days.

A couple of interesting thoughts and questions:

• Optional opt-in age verification
• Who is the Identify provider?
• Who is in charge of the data? user? at the beginning? later?
• The driver's license is the gold standard of identity in the US
• Widely accepted ID vs cost
• (on another note: privacy/information being asked for more often because it's easier to get/verify the data)
• protecting identity in the world
• role
• multiple identities
• What makes people pick and use these systems? How do they choose which system they are using?
• Verify trust, reputation
• When do you not want to be verified? identified
• Custodial identity (for a child, minor) delegating identity verification

After the break we went straight into the technology presentations. In less than an hour, I had an overview of OSIS, the Liberty Alliance, SAML, Cardspace, Higgins, OpenID and Shibboleth. Awesome! Then came speed geeking. It was really interesting to see how Kaylia did speed geeking [more info]. It was very different from the method I used at the last geek dinner.

Then it was informally over until dinner. I got caught up on email (no wifi all through the weekend!) and had a roiling conversation over yummy thai.

I'm hosting Powerpoint Karaoke tomorrow night at the unTalent Show after dinner. 8pm @ the Monte Carlo in Mountain View.

So far, I have been really impressed with the ease of open space organizing. I am definitely going to pay attention to this method/process and take it back to LA with me.

I'm also planning on hosting/running/whatever a session on multiple personalities: how people (don't) see themselves in real-life and how they expect identity (and verification) systems to work (with web sites/applications, complimentary software and applications and beyond). I'm probably going to do this on Wed.

Note: Yes, I know this post needs lots of link love. I am tired and it is late, and I will add them later. If you want to add your link in the comments, please do.