Tue, May 15, 2007
Internet Identity Workshop 2007, Day One
#
Quick thoughts from day one of the
Internet
Identity Workshop (IIW): (M9G)
- This is the fourth IIW. The first one was in October 2005.
Amazing. It feels like we've been doing these for at least five
years. (M9H)
- Over half of the participants were there for the first time. (M9I)
- I opened the conference with an
introduction to
IdentityCommons. Got some good feedback, and great support from
others who have been active in the rebirth of IdentityCommons. My
big goal is to get the community to think of IdentityCommons as
"we," not "they." We'll see how successful we are at the end of this
workshop. (M9J)
- We participated in a nice exercise where folks got into small groups
and surfaced questions. It got people interacting, and as
PhilWindley noted afterwards, people stayed in small groups chatting
away well after the day had ended. (M9K)
- One thing that struck me about the group exercise: I heard no new
questions. A common characteristic of WickedProblems is not knowing
what the questions are. A good number of us seemed to have
successfully identified most of the key questions a long time ago.
This is both a sign of progress and of concern. We as a community are
starting to face growing pains, and community memory is becoming
more and more of an issue. DocSearls suggested that in addition to
surfacing the questions, we should have asked, "Okay, who has the
answers?" I think some variation of that would have made an
excellent complementary exercise. (M9M)
- I like Pibb, JanRain's Web-based real-time group
chat tool that uses OpenID. (Think IRC on the Web with OpenID for
identities.) But I also agree with ChrisMessina; Pibb
needs permalinks -- granular as well as thread-level. (M9N)
- We had a series of lightning presentations following the group
exercise. They were all well done. Remarkably, they were all about
basically the same thing, only told from different angles, something
that MaryHodder also
observed. I
think this is a good sign. It shows the ongoing convergence of our
community. There was also a lot of SpotlightOnOthers -- folks
referring to each other's work, even borrowing slides from each
other -- another sign of a healthy community. (M9O)
- There wasn't anything new conceptually, but there were many more
implementations, yet another sign of progress. SpeedGeeking
basically consisted of 15 different implementations of SingleSignOn,
which doesn't make good fodder for demos, but which is great for the
community. (M9P)
- Two SpeedGeeking projects stood out: Vidoop
and Sxipper. Vidoop is user authentication
via image recognition and categorization, which in and of itself is
interesting. But what got people buzzing was its business model:
sponsoring images that would be displayed to users for
authentication. I don't know if it's viable, but it's definitely
creative. Sxipper is a Firefox plugin that handles account
registration and login. What's really interesting is what's
happening beneath the covers: It's essentially an OpenID
IdentityBroker running from your browser. It looked very slick; I'm
looking forward to playing with it. (M9Q)
- DocSearls gave his traditional day one closing talk. I've heard
bits and pieces of this talk many times, but I never tire of
listening to him speak. He's just a fantastic storyteller, and he's
always on point. (M9R)
- I carpooled with FenLabalme, and as we were discussing our takeaways
on the way back, he said, "I'm glad I didn't sit with you at
dinner." He wasn't joking, and I wasn't offended! I felt the same
way! One of the really special things about this community is that
there are no snobs. We all like to hang out with each other, but we
all also really value quality time with folks we don't know. You
could really see this at dinner. I didn't see any cliques, and
there was plenty of mixing. (M9S)
/events |
Posted at 1:12am
EEK Speaks
A blog about collaboration, community-building, and the various
goings-on at Blue Oxen
Associates, with occasional digressions on food and other vital
matters.
Subscribe
Comments
Comments disabled until future notice. If you'd like to contact me, use my i-name (=eekim).