Like the other attendees, I very much enjoyed the Kuppinger ColeEuropean Identity and Cloud Conference (EIC) 2016 held in Munich in May. The conference is growing by leaps and bounds but still provides plenty of opportunity for interaction and exchange of information. Run by Europeans for Europeans, it provides great insights for those of us from outside the EU and gives us a better understanding of the hot-topics in the European IT community.
If you haven’t attended, the IIW is the perfect “un-conference. It has no keynotes or panels, it’s about getting stuff done.” Besides that, everyone doing anything leading edge in digital identity attends as often as they can – it’s a place to collaborate and a Who’s Who of experts. Why keynote them?
But Phil explained there were many attending the conference who were new to Identity and didn’t have any context or way to grasp what people working in the area had already been through. So he asked me to talk about “The Laws of Identity 10 years later”.
The “later” was intriguing. It gave me the opportunity to share what we had learned 10 years ago, and then begin to discuss what we have learned since. I’ve been wanting the chance to get a conversation going about that, so I agreed to take the risk of breaking the no-keynote taboo.
As the day of the conference approached, I saw there was no mention of a keynote in the conference materials, and began to dread being booed out of Mountain View for doing a keynote in a sacred place… Anyway I forsook slides (what a liberating experience!) and just jotted down a few notes in case the keynote (an un-keynote?) actually took place. Which it did – and those in the audience were more than gracious. It led to great conversations with people approaching identity in new ways, including conversations about one of my big new interests: blockchain.
I thought the best way to share the experience is by sharing the Kim Cameron IIW twitter feed. So here goes:
