Equals Drummond

Phil Windley, co-founder and CTO of Kynetx (among the many hats he wears), wrote his own rules language, KRL, to “program the Web”. So when Phil writes the following about XDI after he and his team did a two-day deep dive on XDI with XDI4J project founder Markus Sabadello and I, it means a lot.

I haven’t been posting much about XDI because the OASIS XDI Technical Committee (which I co-chair) is still working on the XDI 1.0 technical specs. But since our philosophy has been to code everything in at least one implementation first before committing it to a spec, and since the core XDI graph model and metagraph model are now very solid, by the time the specs come out there will already be multiple operational XDI services.

I hope to finally get time to do many more posts about XDI this fall. In the meantime if you want to learn more, ping me about different ways to get involved.

My primary involvement as a member of the board of the Data Portability Project has been input about XDI as an open standard for portable data. But I’ve always been very enthusiastic about DP’s work on Portability Policies. The DP Project just announced their first Portability Policy deliverable via this blog post on TechCrunch.

On the DP Project board call this morning I shared the view that Portability Policies are an inevitable first step — and a highly welcome one — towards widespread adoption of personal data stores (see my posts earlier this year about PDS here and here). When PDS finally arrive, the irony is that the policy will turn in the other direction, i.e., the individual will have their own data sharing terms and the vendor will be agreeing to those. That’s the essence of VRM.

Iain Henderson of VRM pioneer Mydex is already working on the terms for such an agreement at the Information Sharing Working Group at Kantara.

Bit by bit, the age of personal data stores and personally-controlled data sharing is dawning.

Remember that year-end blog post about how personal data stores (PDS) are closer than they may appear? Now read Phil Windley’s wonderful summary of why it makes so much sense to create a PDX (not really an acronym for “personal data exchange” so much as just a moniker for a global internetwork of PDS).

It’s happening. Look for more news about it by Internet Identity Workshop (May 17-19 in Mountain View, CA). As if you didn’t have enough great reasons to go already.

Joe Andrieu has a wonderful way of cutting the Gordian knot on complex socio-technical topics, with clear prose, compelling arguments, and clever illustrations that explain why you should look at something decidedly differently.

Now he wields that knife on the very knotty “problem” of data ownership.

I passionately agree with Joe (and his Kantara Working Group co-chair Iain Henderson) on this subject; I suspect it’s because my perspective on it was long ago warped by the lens of XDI, which itself is a new way of thinking about data.

Turn the telescope to look at personal data from the standpoint of who controls its  sharing with whom, and many pieces finally come into focus.

Keep that in mind as we move into an XDI-enabled world.

There’s an excellent thread going on among the MyDex team about the accelerating shift towards cloud computing and what this means for the individual. I strongly recommended to them Nicolas Carr’s The Big Switch for a discussion of this very subject.

Arguably, we as individuals need the cloud even more than companies do. On the whole, we have less ability to maintain our own “individual piece of the cloud” than a company does. We have neither the capital, the expertise, nor the ability to persist across major changes (all but the very smallest company can persist when an employee leaves or dies, but when an individual person dies, their world of information disintegrates very quickly).

Google and other cloud-based service providers have recognized this. Given the proper safeguards* (see huge asterisk below), the advantages to individuals maintaining their personal data store of all their personal data assets at one or more cloud service providers are enormous. The latest example: watch the migration taking place from Intuit’s venerable Quicken franchise of desktop personal money management to the cloud-based equivalent at Mint.com.

Mint.com’s advantages are so compelling – all your data is automatically backed up, automatically accessible from any Web-connected device, automatically updated from any of your (supported) financial accounts, automatically able to send you important alerts and reminders – that it makes desktop money management look as antiquated as 5-1/4 inch floppy disks. (Remember, there was a time when 5-1/4 inch floppy disks were manna from heaven.)

If you need any further proof of this paradigm shift, Mint.com was acquired by Intuit last September.

I think we’ve seen only the very start of this paradigm shift of migration of personal data and personal data services to the cloud. And I don’t believe it will be take than a year or two until it becomes the norm. Check back here in January 2012 and let’s see where we are.

*HUGE ASTERISK: I don’t mean for one second to gloss over the topic of the safety (umbrella term for security, privacy, and control) of personal data in the cloud. I spend a good part of my day job as Executive Director of the Information Card Foundation on this topic, and it is the entire premise of emerging VRM service providers like MyDex. It is so deep and rich of a topic that I believe before long it will result in a whole new branch of the law.

This entire fall has been intense with work, thus the paucity of posts here. The holidays brings a welcome respite and a chance to catch up with a few key mental threads.

One of them is the growing awareness of the need for what the VRM community calls personal data stores (PDS). The concept is relatively simple: an online store for your own personal data — anything from classic PII (personally identifiable information), such as your identity and contact data, to any other data that you generate or control (files, blog posts, pictures, papers, music, videos, etc.)

Three things have surprised me about PDS:

1. How generally accepted the notion is by almost anyone who spends much time online, even folks well outside the identity community. It’s a relatively intuitive idea as soon as you understand the basic premise that individual people should have their own data source online.
2. How many names have been applied to the same general concept. As I indicated, PDS is only the term applied by the VRM community. The same general concept has been called probably a dozen other names. Here’s an excellent blog post by Mark Dixon that calls it a Personal Identity-Persona Service and a Security Identity Bank Vault.
3. How hard it is to implement. Though there have been several attempts, such as the Mine! Project, nothing has come remotely close to catching on yet.

I have several theses as to why this is so (and yes, the need for a Internet data sharing standard like XDI is high on the list), but I’ll save those for another blog post.

Here, I’ll just conclude with a simple prediction: it’s a threshold problem. Once the first practical solution for PDS starts to take hold, it will catch on and grow just like the first social networks did. The only question is what application will provide that initial traction.

At the Glue Conference this week I’m enjoying a great set of speakers lined up by Eric Norlin on the topic of how everything in the networked universe gets glued together using Web 2.0 tools and beyond. (The talk Mitch Kapor gave this morning was worth the trip all by itself.)

In a few minutes I’ll be on a panel called Implementing the Open Web. In chatting with Lloyd Hilaiel of Yahoo, Kevin Mullins of MIT, and Phil Windley of Kynetx about this topic last night, we hit on one key point that Phil articulated this way: “People tend to conflate ‘open’ with ‘public domain’, i.e.,  that anything that qualifies as open must be freely available to all.”

It struck me how true this is. It reminds me of the Richard Stallman quote describing open source (cited in the Wikipedia Gratis versus Libre article): “Think free as in free speech, not free beer.”

In terms of data on the Open Web, what this means that even though a particular pool of data may be available via an open standard, publicly-accessible interface, it does NOT mean this data must be publicly available to anyone. If that were true, the whole concept of a personal data store — a key premise of VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) — would not be possible.

So what makes any system or node participating in the Web “open” is not that its data is public, but that the metadata and services for accessing it are available via a publicly discoverable, open-standard interface. The public discovery portion of this is the goal of the XRD work now underway at the XRI Technical Committee at OASIS (based on the original XRDS work – see this blog post by Eran Hammer-Lahav of Yahoo to understand the differences). The open standard portion is the output of IETF, W3C, OASIS, and all the other SSOs (standards-setting organizations) for the net. (The potential of the Open Web Foundation, once it finishes its bootstrap stage, is to make this process of creating open standards even more lightweight and distributed.)

This combination – open discovery of open interfaces accessible over open protocols – is the DNA of the Open Web. And it applies equally to both public and private data. In fact it can finally open up what might be called the Permissioned Web - the Web of all all data that any one party has permission from other parties to access.

That would lead us to the need for integrating identity and permissions with the data, which brings us to the motivations for XDI as a semantic data sharing format/protocol – but my panel is about to start so that will have to be another post.

I’m going to start referring to her as the Venn Queen. Eve Maler has done another Venn diagram, this time to show the relationship of whole areas of the “user-centric” sphere of activities. Going into Digital ID World next week, I’ll use this to help orient conversations around why there needs to be a simple, consistent way for users to control and manage identity and data sharing relationships no matter what site, application, or type of relationship is involved. We just need to build it! (hint: OpenID + relationship cards + XDI =

So much for the naive thought that I’ have time at the Burton Catalyst conference last week to finally blog about two subjects near and dear to my heart that I knew would be covered at the conference. It backfired because they were too topical — all available time was consumed by related conversations.

I did manage two posts about the first one — launch of the Information Card Foundation — about which there will be much more to say in the coming months.

But the other one — relationship cards — is long overdue. I first promised to blog more about r-cards after both doing a demo and hearing Bob Blakley’s fantastic talk on The Relationship Layer at Spring IIW in May. Then Joe Andrieu and Eve Maler both posted about them and asked me to add more details. Then I fell into an abyss of work (actually building this stuff) from which I have yet to climb out.

But Bob’s new talk on The Relationship Layer at Catalyst last week, followed by Eve’s talk on The Care and Feeding of Online Relationships, plus the upcoming VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) Workshop at the Harvard Berkman Project on July 14-15, compels me to finally post about why I believe r-cards may be what finally pushes Internet identity across the chasm.

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First: what is a relationship card (”r-card”)? At the most general, the definition I would offer is:  “a digital object instantiating a mutually authorized data sharing relationship between two or more parties on a network”. The abstraction is intentional: the generic concept of an r-card, like the generic concept of a folder, a link, or a network, can take different forms in different implementations.

To take a step more towards the concrete, the concept of an r-card was conceived at the Higgins Project as a new kind of information card (i-card). For their part, i-cards were first conceived by Kim Cameron and team at Microsoft, where they have been promoted as a key element of Microsoft’s vision of an identity metasystem. These memes subsequently took hold at Higgins, among other places, where the concept of an i-card was generalized to the definition that currently appears on Wikipedia:

An i-card is a rectangular icon displayed in the user interface of an identity selector (sometimes also called an identity agent) that represents a digital identity–a set of claims about some entity (typically a person, but it could also be an organization, application, service, digital object, etc.).

The i-card metaphor is based on familiar physical identity credentials like business cards, credit cards, library cards, association cards, driver’s licenses, badges, etc. However, just as computer file folders are similar to but more powerful than real-world file folders, i-cards are similar to but more powerful than real-world identification cards. The i-card metaphor is identical to the information card metaphor used in numerous identity selectors.

So what distinguishes an r-card from a plain-vanilla i-card? The capability to instantiate an ongoing data sharing relationship. In other words, a standard i-card invokes a one-time exchange of a set of digital claims using a security token. An r-card, by contrast, exchanges a set of claims and associated policies that enables both parties to continue to share other information over time, e.g.:

• Updates to the initial values of the claims
• New claims
• Permissions and controls over communications via other channels
• Changes to the r-card itself

A simple analogy would be: a standard i-card is like showing your driver’s license to a bartender to prove you are of age: you use it once and put it away. An r-card is much more like giving a business card to an associate or a customer: it is an invitation for an ongoing relationship via the address(es) and other information shared on the card.

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But while instantiating a private data sharing channel by exchanging a digital object is cool — sort of like RSS on steriods — for some reason that aspect alone doesn’t capture the real power of r-cards. Case in point: after a live participatory enactment of how r-cards work with audience members during the first day of IIW in May (all based on business cards, scissors, and string — no computers involved), several audience members came up to me and said, “Why didn’t you show this years ago? Anyone can understand the value of r-cards. They are the most compelling use case we’ve ever heard for all this Internet identity stuff.”

After that experience, even I was trying to grok what it was that made r-cards so intuitive and attractive. I was having trouble putting it into words until I was listening to Bob Blakley’s talk on The Relationship Layer again at Catalyst last Wednesday morning. At the midway point, he put up an “intermission” slide with five bullets summarizing the first half of his talk. Two of them hit me like they were shot out of a gun:

Relationship is the context which protects the security and the privacy of identity information.

Identities are built in the context of relationships.

This Copernican revolution Bob was proposing — that relationship is really the sun around which identities orbit — suddenly made me look at r-cards in a new way. It wasn’t just that r-cards enabled bidirectional data sharing. It was that r-cards create the context for a relationship. And by doing so, they call forth all social dynamics of real world relationships that are often missing on the Web today. Dynamics like:

“I am more inclined to trust you because we both know if you break that trust, I can terminate the relationship.”

“Of course you wouldn’t share our private shared information outside our relationship — friends always respect each other’s privacy.”

“Each of us shares information in proportion to the value it brings to the relationship — both of us are incented to build that value.”

That’s why people find r-cards so intuitive — they are a way of creating and managing the same balanced, mutually-controlled, give-and-take between two parties over a network that we have in the real world relationships we manage every day. And they can apply to any form of relationship — person-to-person, person-to-community, person-to-employer, person-to-vendor, etc.

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Okay, okay, at this point I know all the geeks are screaming “enough with the soft stuff — where’’s the technical beef??” I don’t want to duck that question, because as I’ve told Joe Andrieu, chair of the VRM Standards group, I’m knee-deep in it every day. But with the limited time I have left for this post, I can only give the high-level recipe we are currently putting to the oven test at Parity and the Higgins Project:

• Take a conventional i-card as currently defined by the Microsoft ISIP documents (which can’t get into an SDO fast enough).
• Add an OpenID — or to be precise, an identifier on which you can do XRDS discovery to locate a data sharing endpoint. In Higgins we call this form of identifier a UDI (Universal Data Identifier).
• When the r-card recipient receives the r-card, use the UDI to perform XRDS discovery of an Internet data sharing protocol supported by both parties.
• Intiatite data sharing via the selected protocol, using the UDI and other supporting claims on the r-card as necessary.

Of course readers of this blog know what data sharing protocol I have in mind: XDI — specifically the XDI RDF model. It’s particularly well-suited to r-cards because XDI link contracts provide a portable, machine-readable description of the mutually-agreed data sharing controls. But it’s important to clarify that any data sharing protocol supported by both parties will work. As an example, Asa Hardcastle showed a wonderful demo of OpenID-enabled Liberty ID-WSF at Spring IIW, and we are deep in conversations about how UDI discovery for ID-WSF endpoints can work. OpenID Attribute Exchange is another option because any OpenID identifier can already support XRDS service discovery.

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I know that’s only the tip of the iceburg, but this is a huge topic that I’ll be posting about for months. For example, in Bob’s talk he showed a relationship schema that he, Lori Rowland, and their colleagues at Burton group have already started to develop. I eagerly anticipate working with them to map that to XDI link contracts to make sure we have all the bases covered.

And I’d like to find time to start posting some example r-card XDI messages using super-simple X3 format to illustrate common use cases like the VRM personal address manager.

But right now I’m going to work on maintaining a particularly important relationship — with my wife — by getting to bed!

Chris Messina has a post worth reading about the whole subject of Data Portability. Though it is a complex new topic that demands a longer and more thoughtful post, the one point he and Chris Saad agree on is that the meme is here to stay. As the wonderful book Made to Stick would characterize it, “data portability” is a highly sticky idea. It’s not going away anytime soon.

(On a side note, I’m desparately seeking time to do a longer post about Made to Stick, which every technology communicator should not just read but memorize. It was the inspiration for the presentation I gave at Internet Identity Workshop today which used no slides at all. Bill Coleman insisted Paul Trevithick read it. Paul insisted I read it. I insist you read it. ’nuff said.)