* Identity management conferences
A three-day Identity Mashup Conference took place last week hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. This was another in a long string of individual, or as it’s being called “user-centric” identity meetings this year.
Others include this spring’s Internet Identity Workshop and next month’s Liberty Alliance meeting in Vancouver. There’ll also be further meetings in the fall, with details to come later. In effect, what’s occurring is a permanent floating face-to-face discussion among thought leaders and stakeholders in the identity field.
Last week’s gathering was subtitled “Who controls and protects the digital me?”, which was very reminiscent of the first user-centric identity project, Novell’s ill-fated DigitalME (see “A Tale of two vaults”) but was definitely geared towards identity and open source. Of course, if Novell resurrected DigitalME today it probably would be an open source project, also.
The “glue” holding the Identity Mashup Conference together, though, was undoubtedly the Higgins Project (see “Higgins: A framework to build user-centric, ID-enabled services”). Not that the conference was about Higgins, but given the project’s close association with the Berkman Center (Berkman Senior Fellow John Clippinger could be considered the godfather of Higgins) it was often the framework (pun intended) of the discussions.
The conference even featured a session and demonstration of a working Internet service built on the Higgins Framework. Best Buy’s “My Virtual Model” is a consumer of data created with applications at the “My Virtual Model” Web site and shared using Web services based on the Higgins framework. It’s a small start – but it is actually working.
The speaker list from the Identity Mashup read like a virtual Who’s Who of identity covering industry, education and government as well as consumer/user organizations. Should another session be held, it might be worthwhile for you to go – and I’ll be sure to tell you if one does get scheduled.
In the meantime, you could plan to be in Vancouver next month for the Open Space meetings at the Liberty Alliance session, or start thinking about another Internet Identity Workshop in conjunction with this fall’s Digital ID World.
Even if your involvement with identity and identity management is entirely within the corporate realm, user-centric identity – in the form of Microsoft’s Card Space and its open source equivalents – will be on your users’ desktops as soon as you start to upgrade to Windows Vista. It’s best to be prepared.
