SocialPhysics

Paul's new blog

I've started a new blog (http://incontextblog.com) and will be posting there from now on.

FTC and OECD

• Paul will be on a couple of panels this April 23-24 at the Federal Trade Commission's "Proof Positive: New Directions for ID Authentication" workshop.

• He'll also be participating in the OECD's Workshop on Digital Identity Management in Trondheim, Norway 8-9

Identity Big Bang

Kudos to Dale Olds and the rest of the Bandit team for their ground breaking demonstration at Brainshare this week.

Novell demonstrated their new Open Source Identity Selector on the Macintosh and Linux that supports the same Information Cards as Windows CardSpace.  Novell is contributing this identity selector to Higgins along with a new OpenID context provider.  Using these and the Higgins STS one can access any site that accepts infocards with an openID account.  See the details on Dale's and Pat's blogs. http://virtualsoul.org/blog/2007/03/23/all-your-infocard-are-belong-to-us/  and http://www.whoireallyam.com/?p=51

ITU-T Focus Group on IdMithic

Paul will be attending the first meeting of this new group Feb 13-16. Here is the stated scope:

The scope of the Focus Group is Identity Management (IdM) for telecommunications/ICT in general; and specifically to facilitate and advance the development of a generic IdM framework and means of discovery of autonomous distributed identities and identity federations and implementations.

Mary and Paul and Eclipscon 2007

Mary is doing a long talk, Paul a short talk (9 minutes!) and we're organizing a BOF too. (All about Higgins of course!)

Higgins and Life at Eclipse

Mike Milinkovitch the Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation just wrote this terribly nice post about Higgins.

Privacy and Contextual Integrity

Here is the abstract from what looks like an interesting Stanford/NYU paper based on Helen Nissenbaum's earlier paper here. It inspired this story in the Economist:

Contextual integrity is a conceptual framework for understanding privacy expectations and their implications developed in the literature on law, public policy, and political philosophy. We formalize some aspects of contextual integrity in a logical framework for expressing and reasoning about norms of transmission of personal information. In comparison with access control and privacy policy frameworks such as RBAC, EPAL, and P3P, these norms focus on who personal information is about, how it is transmitted, and past and future actions by both the subject and the users of the information. Norms can be positive or negative depending on whether they refer to actions that are allowed or disallowed. Our model is expressive enough to capture naturally many notions of privacy found in legislation, including those found in HIPAA, COPPA, and GLBA. A number of important problems regarding compliance with privacy norms, future requirements associated with specific actions, and relations between policies and legal standards reduce to standard decision procedures for temporal logic.

Full paper is here.

Interoperability

As part of the OSIS effort we've been contributing to the creation of a document entitled Interoperability Space that tries to define what "interoperability" means for our emerging open source identity layer. As usual trying to write things down, has forced more clarity. The next step will be to add a table that will summarize how various products relate to the dimensions in the document. After that we'll start assembling use cases.

A gentle introduction to i-names

Phil Windley wrote this introduction to XRIs and i-names. Other than a minor error in stating that i-names are not reassignable (they are, but the underlying i-numbers are not), it's great to have i-names be presented in an accessible way. Making i-names seem simple is important to those of us integrating them into our solutions. Folks will gradually discover that there's more under the hood than they realized. But they have to get one first.

Doc's VRM Project

I've long considered that I work for Doc Searls. No, he doesn't pay me much. Well, anything. But what he now calls VRM is a powerful vision, and one worth working for.

Without an interoperable, user-centric/independent identity layer, VRM won't scale. It'll just be a bunch of special cases. Interesting, but no big bang. So that's the part of the VRM thing that I focus on in Higgins and related projects. What we need is an easy, universal way to project facets of yourself onto different "others" (including vendors) based on the context. That's what will enable VRM.