Whitepaper on the laws… and more…

A number of us have spent the last four or five days at Digital Identity World (DIDW) in San Francisco. DIDW really is an entire world, and a great one for getting a deeper understanding of identity. Many of us had the chance to meet in person for the first time, and I'm sure came away with a deep supply of “aha” moments.

I gave a presentation on the Laws of Identity and was on a panel led by Doc Searls featuring Marc Canter, Dick Hardt, Drummond Reed and Johannes Ernst. In addition I participated in the Digital Identity Update presented by Microsoft's Distributed Systems CTO John Shewchuk and InfoCard's Bill Barnes. It was a pretty moving experience.

Flying down, a fellow passenger in my seat (they were really packing us in) spilled her coffee on my laptop so I've been doing Cameron Unplugged for the last few days. I haven't got a clue yet about who's been blogging or what has been said.

For those who weren't able to attend, I've finally finished a whitepaper on the Laws of Identity, which I will post on www.identityblog.com in “pdf” format as soon as possible. In a meantime, msdn has published an online version here.

At the same time, those of us working on InfoCards and other Web Services identity components at Microsoft published a whitepaper clarifying our thoughts about how to bring about the kind of Identity Metasystem defined by the Laws… This thinking is very much in line with our presentation a year ago at DIDW – though our research and conversations have led to ideas which are noticeably more refined. Further, within a few weeks people will be able to play with early ‘beta bits’.

But whatever you do, don't crank your expectations into overdrive… A metasystem only works if people who can prosper through this kind of ecology climb aboard. This is not something Microsoft wants to do – or even could do – by itself. We won't be “declaiming”… We're early in this process.

The good news is there are a great number of innovative people from all over the industry – and crossing all the conventional fault lines – who want this project to happen. It's actually an incredible experience. More to come…

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Kim Cameron

Work on identity.