Learning Identity

One of the things I’ve found about try­ing to fig­ure out iden­tity man­age­ment con­cepts and tech­no­logy is that there are lots of nuances, lots of things to worry about, and it tends to make you more wary (which I guess is all to the good). I now am more care­ful about wheth­er web­sites have believ­able pri­vacy policies before I sign up for them, I have a num­ber of free email accounts for the sole pur­pose of get­ting news­let­ters or regis­ter­ing at web­sites, and I more often fig­ure the inform­a­tion on these web­sites is unlikely to be worth the effort. 

It’s excit­ing though, being part of some­thing that is import­ant and where people are real­ising the import­ance more day by day, sort of like XML in the early days where people start­ing say­ing, yes I do have that prob­lem and maybe this tech­no­logy can help solve it. So part of what I hope to do in the com­ing year is help the Liberty Alli­ance fig­ure out how to help people learn what they need to know about some of these con­cepts, tech­no­lo­gies, and spe­cific­a­tions. Iden­tity man­age­ment is start­ing to expand bey­ond the “in group” now as more people start to real­ise the import­ance of build­ing it (and secur­ity) into sys­tems from the begin­ning rather than try­ing to bolt it on after­wards. Fig­ur­ing iden­tity out takes time – iden­tity man­age­ment is inher­ently com­plex (well, more com­plex than XML, any­way ;-)) and although Ein­stein’s fam­ous quote says things should be made as simple as pos­sible, it also says “but not simpler”.

One of the things that Liberty does to tell people about Liberty-related aspects of iden­tity is to host web­casts on a reg­u­lar basis. This month’s is on the People Ser­vice:

The Liberty ID-WSF People Ser­vice, a key com­pon­ent in ID-WSF 2.0, is the industry’s first com­pre­hens­ive plat­form for man­aging social inform­a­tion with­in an open fed­er­ated net­work envir­on­ment. People Ser­vice allows con­sumers and enter­prise users to man­age social applic­a­tions such as book­marks, blog­ging, cal­en­dars, photo shar­ing and instant mes­saging from a com­mon lay­er with­in the ID-WSF 2.0 frame­work. Liberty People Ser­vice has been developed to allow indi­vidu­als to eas­ily store, main­tain, and cat­egor­ize online rela­tion­ships so that oth­er socially-aware Web ser­vices applic­a­tions can lever­age inform­a­tion based on the con­sent and pri­vacy con­trols estab­lished by a user in the fed­er­ated social net­work. With Liberty Alli­ance People Ser­vice, con­sumers and enter­prise users can now cent­rally man­age all of their online social rela­tion­ships using a fed­er­ated net­work approach with pri­vacy con­trols built into the sys­tem allow­ing users to lever­age the pri­vacy func­tion­al­ity of Liberty Web Ser­vices to more eas­ily and securely share social and enter­prise inform­a­tion across applic­a­tions, plat­forms and ser­vice pro­viders. In this Web cast, we’ll over­view the func­tion­al­ity of People Ser­vice and provide some use case examples. You won’t want to miss this highly inform­at­ive session.

The web­cast is on this com­ing Wed­nes­day (Janu­ary 11, 2006) at 8 am Pacific; if you’re think­ing of listen­ing in please register soon (prefer­ably by Monday) so there will be enough phone lines booked.