There's an interesting new identity blog on the scene by Pete Rowley. He's an open source kind of guy – positive too – and picked up on my recent InfoCard token tutorial:
“I have been pretty busy recently, which is why Kim Cameron managed to sneak by a tutorial and demo of InfoCard that also revealed the WordPress relying party PHP code for the LAMP stack. It includes a short demo video which walks through how InfoCard works when logging in to a site that is useful to review before actually reading the tutorial. Excellent!
“Now if I might be so bold Kim, could we have the code released under an open source license.”
Thanks, Pete. In terms of releasing code, I truly hope the industry hasn't arrived at the point where you need licensing for a tutorial.
The bottom line? I put my ideas out there and invited everyone to use them in any way that would advance identity on the web. I hope that's straightforward enough.
Anyway, I like Pete's pragmatic and multi-sided approach. Here's another example:
Johannes Ernst says “If user-centricity is really what we are after, it follows that I am my own identity provider in many circumstances, doesn’t it?†I think the answer to that is, to begin with. Digital identity for the internet is a bootstrap problem. Not much can be demanded or expected to begin with, and third party asserted claims are definitely a lot to ask right now.
However given a generally accepted system of identity claims assertion for the internet, I would expect that over time many of those claims would be expected to be backed up by a third party. For sure, some things will never require that: my favourite movie and other such trivia. But a lot of claims are generally self asserted now because they have to be, like my nationality, my employer, my professional affiliations, people I know, and many others may well naturally become third party claims about me, and expected to be.
User-centric identity does not imply user asserted identity, that is merely the initial expected state in order to garner adoption. Nothing more. I fully expect there to be higher level of trust in the identity claims asserted in the future, not merely the status quo.
I totally agree.