{"id":979,"date":"2008-04-28T21:25:29","date_gmt":"2008-04-29T05:25:29","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=979"},"modified":"2008-04-28T21:25:29","modified_gmt":"2008-04-29T05:25:29","slug":"drstarcat-on-project-pamela","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/?p=979","title":{"rendered":"Drstarcat on Project Pamela"},"content":{"rendered":"

drstarcat.com <\/a>is\u00a0doing “A History of Tomorrow's Internet<\/a>” – a\u00a0dive into Information Cards, CardSpace, Higgins and now, in Part Five,\u00a0The Pamela Project.\u00a0The “future history” is\u00a0a personal\u00a0tale that is definitely\u00a0worth reading.\u00a0 The most recent post introduces us to Pamela Dingle herself – a\u00a0woman who has played a key role\u00a0–\u00a0both technically and as a leader\u00a0–\u00a0in advancing Information Cards.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Drstarcat writes:<\/p>\n

“As I\u2019ve explained more than once in this blog, a greater problem than finding reliable Identity Providers is getting the websites we know and love to become Relying Parties. That is exactly the problem that Pamela has deemed to attack with her eponymous project. As the project\u2019s mission statement<\/a> says, \u201cThe Pamela Project is a grassroots organization dedicated to providing community support for both technical and non-technical web users and administrators who wish to use or deploy information card technologies.\u201d Given the difficulties I experienced even USING iCards as a non-technical web user, this seems like a pretty ambitious task, and as part of this post, I\u2019m going to try to get my blog up and running. First, a few words about Pamela and the history of the project.<\/p>\n

“Pamela first ran into the issues surrounding Identity in her role as a technology consultant in Calgary in 1999. Anyone who\u2019s done any large-scale enterprise software installation has likely had a similar experience\u2013try to do anything and you\u2019ll run into a myriad of (often semi-functional) authentication and directory services before you can even get off the ground. She\u2019d been working on Peoplesoft installations and with Oblix (an enterprise self-service password management tool later acquired by Oracle), when she attended her first Burton Identity<\/a> conference in 2001. It was here she first began to think of Identity as a (the?) core technology problem, as opposed to something peripheral to what she wanted to get done. It\u2019s a realization that, once had, can become a little consuming (trust me, I spend WAY too much time building software to be blogging about anything\u2013especially, SOFTWARE).<\/p>\n

“Her second \u201cah-ha\u201d moment came when, if my notes serve me correctly, she was \u201chit on the head with a brick\u201d by Kim Cameron<\/a> at the 2002 Catalyst conference. There he drew her a brief sketch on a napkin where he showed the three party system (Subject, Relying Party, Identity Provider) that is at the core of most of the emerging identity systems. She was hooked, but it wasn\u2019t until in 2005, when Kim added some sample PHP Relying Party code to his blog that she saw a place where she could contribute. As a sometimes PHP hacker, she took the simple code, and began to port it over to some of her favorite PHP frameworks (WordPress, Joomla, and MediaWiki). Since that time, she and about 10 other contributers have been working to get a 1.0 version of the product out, which, given Pamela\u2019s commitment, I suspect will be about like most other project\u2019s 2.0 release.<\/p>\n

“Before writing about my experience installing the WordPress v0.9 plugin, a word about the seemingly self-promulgatory name of the project because I think it says a lot about Pamela as a person and the Identity movement she\u2019s part of. According to Pamela it\u2019s the last name she would have thought of as a woman working as a technologist. As she explains, it\u2019s hard enough as a woman to get recognized as a serious technologist without drawing unnecessary attention to yourself. Having a wife who is one the best Java engineers in NYC, but who also is regularly asked if she REALLY wrote the stunning code she produces, I can attest this is true. It\u2019s because of this stereotype though that Pamela chose the name. She was tired, as someone who is self-admittedly \u201cvocal\u201d, of this kind of self-inflicted sheepishness. So in \u201cdefiance to self-regulation\u201d, and at Craig Burton<\/a>\u2019s urging, she chose The Pamela Project…<\/p>\n

“I\u2019ll let you know how my experience actually USING the Pamela project goes in my next post. In the mean time, as you wait in breathless anticipation, why not go over to the project\u2019s site and ask Pamela<\/a> how you can be of use. This is a big project and they\u2019re going to need all the help they can get.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

[More here.<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Pamela Project: a grassroots organization providing community support for web users and administrators who wish to use or deploy information card technologies<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[24,7,56,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}