Liberty Baby

The Liberty Alli­ance quarterly spon­sors meet­ing was in Van­couver this week, so even though I’m still offi­cially on mater­nity leave, I decided to attend as much as I could (baby allow­ing). It was worth­while going, the baby was a little fussy but slept through enough of the time that I could take part in some of the meet­ing, although I will admit there was one time while I was watch­ing a pre­vi­ously fussy baby lie on the chan­ging mat in the ladies, wav­ing her legs and arms and gurg­ling hap­pily at the sight of the under-basin plumb­ing, when I wondered wheth­er I should be at home instead. That “why am I here” feel­ing passed once she let her­self be put in the sling so I could go back to the meeting.

The Liberty meet­ing itself seemed to go well from what I saw, quite a few people took advant­age of it being opened up to non-mem­bers to observe and par­ti­cip­ate, at least in the meet­ings I was in. It’s always hard for new people to really take part, but I think this exper­i­ment was successful.

The Iden­tity Open­Space meet­ing, jointly pro­duced by the Liberty people and some people from the Inter­net Iden­tity Work­shop, was sched­uled for the Thursday and Fri­day after the Liberty meet­ing. Lots of people stayed over for this, lots more came spe­cific­ally for the meet­ing. I did­n’t see every­one on the list of attendees that I knew, but that’s prob­ably at least in part because the baby melted down in a big way in the early after­noon on Thursday so I had to take her home, and decided mak­ing her take in a fourth day of meet­ings and present­a­tions on Fri­day would be too much for all con­cerned. Still, she slept through Jane Win­n’s Leg­al Basics, lunch, and Robin Wilton’s Pri­vacy and ID Theft before throw­ing her wobbly, so I got to par­ti­cip­ate to some extent.

Jane’s present­a­tion, as usu­al, was ter­rif­ic. She’s quick to grasp the cent­ral points of issues, her talks are always thought-pro­vok­ing and suit­ably cyn­ic­al, and I was glad to be able to attend it, and also glad she took part in the Liberty meet­ing before the IOS event. Robin is also a deep thinker whose blog often por­trays things in a dif­fer­ent way to the gen­er­ally accep­ted dogma; he’s part of the group I’m in at Sun, and I think we’re lucky to have him there.

The IOS did seem to go well from what I saw and heard, bring­ing togeth­er people with dif­fer­ent exper­i­ences, know­ledge, and view­points. Kaliya Ham­lin organ­ised it and ensured people doc­u­mented the ses­sions on the wiki. This goes some way to neg­at­ing one of the chief unavoid­able prob­lems of this format — that there are often things going on in par­al­lel that I’d like to attend.

Kaliya put up a sign encour­aging people to con­trib­ute or learn, or go where they could con­trib­ute or learn, and I hope that those who sat there quietly, not con­trib­ut­ing, will con­trib­ute what they learned some­place else in the future. Iden­tity man­age­ment, with all its rami­fic­a­tions of pri­vacy, secur­ity, and the user exper­i­ence, is a com­plic­ated issue and affects all of us and the more people talk about the issues and try to come togeth­er on solu­tions, the bet­ter. I think this meet­ing helped with that and it’ll be inter­est­ing to see what comes out of it. Right now I’m an out­side observ­er until my mater­nity leave is over but I’m already look­ing for­ward to par­ti­cip­at­ing lots when the baby allows.