Author: Kim Cameron

Over the last few days I have received a lot of interesting links and emails that I want to share with those of you involved in this conversation. There's a snow storm coming so maybe I can just hybernate over the weekend and do just that. Anyway, I had a good laugh at Myren's spirited comment (he's from the interesting www.alienintels.com) in response to those spurring me on to faster delivery:

pardon me, but f that on demand non-sense. tell people to back off their rss readers 2880 minutes or so. take all the time you want. law number one about writing immutable laws is that you have to get them right. its been a month plus some change, this pace has been amazing. keep up the good work. no need to rush.

Hey, cool yo Myren. I appreciate that. Though I'm not sure what my excuse will be once we've finished the laws…

Phil Becker of Digital ID World has put together his top-ten identity predictions for 2005.

And hey gang, the Laws made number six. I sure hope we can, as an industry, live up to the opportunity we all have in front of us.

6. Kim Cameron's “Laws of Identity” conversation will begin affecting products.
This conversation, started at the October Digital ID World conference, may be the most important thing going on in identity right now. It has re-engaged a number of serious identity thinkers, and clarified things for many observers. In a few short months, it has already shaken up thinking in several arenas. Kim is Chief Identity Architect at Microsoft, and Microsoft's identity strategy is gaining clarity again, but the products that this conversation affects in 2005 won't be just Microsoft's.

Lawrence just sent me an emphatic, “No practicing on the live site”. Ah! Shucks!

Had a wierd problem trying to move Radio Userland from one machine to another last night. Although I was trying to restore from the cloud, my newly installed copy clobbered the cloud backup. Which reminds me – how many times has a backup really worked anyway? Remember those old tape machines that could write flawlessly but could never read the tapes?

Seemed for an hour or two I had lost everything despite the backups.

Except that Userland's Lawrence Lee came riding to the rescue as he has always done before. Thanks Lawrence. You are a great support guy. Now somehow I need to understand how this restore thing works. Maybe we can practice this again on the weekend.

For those, like me, interested in what happens with the British Identity Card debate, here is a piece from the Guardian which gives some more insight into what is going on. If anyone thought this scheme wouldn't turn political, here is a recent press release from Privacy International – which sounds like it means business:

The watchdog civil liberties organisation Privacy International today accused the UK Shadow Cabinet of perpetrating “an offence against democracy of historic proportions” by agreeing to vote with the government on the controversial Identity Cards Bill.

Privacy International’s Director, Simon Davies, warned: “The Tories have taken one their biggest political gambles for many years. If public opinion turns against the ID scheme as dramatically as it did in Australia they will inevitably fall to third place in the forthcoming elections”.

Privacy International has for fifteen years been the key opponent of identity card schemes, and has been instrumental in overturning card proposals in several countries.

The Tories now stand alone in their support of the government’s proposals. The Liberal Democrats, the UK Independence Party, Plaid Cymru, the Green Party and others political parties have declared their opposition to the scheme.

“The Tory Cabinet decision will result in a fatal split in the party,” Mr Davies predicted. “The decision will cause a crucial divide between the authoritarians and the libertarians. The liberal minded members with conscience will ultimately oppose the decision.”

Mr Davies, who is also Chairman of the non-partisan NO2ID coalition, and who directed the huge 1987 campaign against the Australian national identity card, predicted that public outrage would fill the political void created by the ill-judged decision of the Opposition.

“If this debate cannot be engaged in the Parliament, it will take place on the streets”, he warned.

Privacy International’s background and analysis of the scheme is here.

Someone in the Wild West Gillmore Gaggle – the dust was thick but I'm pretty sure it was Bryan Field-Elliot – suggested I might just be “teasing” folks by releasing the Laws slowly rather than in one big conflagration. He intimated I might even know where I am going with this.

And so I guess I have to admit that I've been working on these ideas for a… er… while now. But I wanted to give my authorators (Doc's new word for the blog readers and writers and casters who author us) a chance to deal with them in detail – and help me figure out how to communicate the things that have been pounding away inside my head. And to see what I am missing, both in terms of explanation and at a more profound level. Finally, there is the fact that I have this darn day job that consumes a fair bit of my time…

But I can accept that enough is enough. So I promise. The remaining two laws this week.

I've been meaning to point people to a couple of other Gillmor Gang interviews.

First, there is the recent discussion with Ray Ozzie – founder of Lotus Notes. If you know him you'll want to hear this. If you don't, check it out for sure – Ray is so clear, perceptive and thoughtful. He is his own analyst.

He says Notes was built on the concept that the nature of the organization was changing. Previously it had been vertically oriented. When Notes came out, organizations were becoming more internally meshed. People within organizations were suddenly collaborating with each other. Today – in the era of Groove – businesses are becoming externally meshed. Individuals are dealing with people from lots of organizations – not to mention friends and family. Software moving forward has to be based on this evolving mesh.

Corollaries:

• The key here is that going forward, IT departments will not be able to simply dictate the software which individuals use – because the software must span companies, each of which will have different IT departments.
• Building things based on ubiquitous standards (COM, J2EE) doesn't take into account the amazing speed at which things slip into history – we always need to look forward 5 years.
• When looking forward, watch the underlying phenomena – the explosion of wireless options; being able to assume that everyone has a PC and access to the net; and terrabyte desktop storage – which has arrived before we even have any idea of what it can be used for…

He also comments sagely on the complexity of current identity-based systems, and wonders what he missed by underestimating the power of anonymous technology. I couldn't agree more – that complexity must go or we all fail.

For those who missed it, the Gang has also interviewed Phil Windley – who does a great survey of identity management issues. I'm not sure I agree with him on the relation between Metadirectory and other technologies, but I'll try to find out more about his thinking and then drill into this.

Dave Kearns’ take on the Fifth Law

In other words, to be successful an identity system must be ubiquitous, pervasive, federated and distributed. This, once again, calls to mind the personal identity system which I've advocated for so long. Perhaps it's time to push more forcefully for a conference or meeting which could explore this topic more fully.

Craig Burton was another presence in the Special Wild West Edition of Gillmor Gaggle. In fact, for those who don't know him, the podcast is a good opportunity to hear some of his haunting, incredibly dense and on-target comments. He also weighed in on the Fifth law with some eerie thinking:

Kim Cameron posts his fifth law of identity this evening. It's a tall order:

The Law of Pluralism:

A universal identity system MUST channel and enable the interworking of multiple identity technologies run by multiple identity providers.

It is this which will allow an identity ecology to emerge, evolve and self-organize.

Dave Winer's RSS is so powerful because it vehicles any content. We need to see that identity itself will have several – perhaps many – contents, and yet these can be expressed in a metasystem.

The law of pluralism is contrary to the laws of customer control. Let's be clear, the law of pluralism requires operating system independence–by definition. This means the Microsoft Identity Archtiect is calling for a system that is not necissarily Windows centric by design. This–of course–is the only way such a system can really work–but consider the implications.

A cross platfrom identity metasystem sun-spot hot and–with the other laws being discussed here–changes everything.