Equals Drummond

The Craig Burton is at it again. Putting together all kinds of cool memes. This time he’s seen how to splice XRI into the FollowFriday endorsement system for Twitter. He calls the concept “microtagging” – using XRIs in the tag space (+plumber, +doctor, +analyst, etc.) to categorize FollowFriday endorsements for aggregation on Scott Lemon’s TopFollowFriday aggregator.

Blows my mind. Who ever thought the structured semantic web would start evolving on Twitter?? But that’s just how this organic Internet thing happens…

I made a long post about it when Bob first presented it at IIW and then the Burton Catalyst conference last June. Now anyone can get it here. See also Bob’s commentary on its evolution here.

Highly recommended for understanding the underlying dynamics of identity and relationship on the net.

I don’t think I’ve ever made a political post in this blog, but tonight is an exception.

We’ve never had an election like this. In my lifetime, I’ve never seen one man and his family and his campaign have such an impact on the direction of this country and this planet.

My wife and I were in tears watching Obama’s acceptance speech with our two sons. Just what it means to see Barack and Michelle and his daughters going to the White House – it’s a symbol to every last one of us of what is possible not just in this country but in every country.

It’s also a huge first step towards restoring our good name in the world.

It is a turning point for the 21st century? No one can say for sure. But I’m going to wake up tomorrow with more hope in my heart for my boy’s future than I have in a long time.

It’s now longer just Yes We Can.

It’s Now We Will.

Boeing has long been one of the most progressive companies when it comes to identity management and how it can enable new value chains in a large ecosystem. Marty Schleiff is one of the reasons. I’ve worked with him extensively on the XRI Technical Committee at OASIS, but Marty’s involved with pretty much every aspect of identity and directory services at Boeing.

Marty’s new blog is called Identity Happens. It was motivated by his idea of creating something like an OSI reference model for identity. Give it a read — this is going to be a great discussion.

Phil Windley has an uncanny ability to size up new technologies in a single bound. Read his take on relationship providers and how far they can go beyond the role of “identity providers” (a term I have never liked since the moment I first heard it six years ago).

As he concludes:

I’m still trying to understand all the details, but convinced of the necessity of this kind of thing. My work on reputation (PDF) was a start at understanding how trust relationships can be created online. I’ll be writing more about this as I understand it more over the coming weeks.

I can hardly wait to read his further thoughts. Relationship is the pot of real gold at the end of the identity rainbow.

Some 34 years after it was published and 20 years after my last (fifth) reading, Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance remains the book that has has the biggest influence on my life. I took my old copy with me on our family vacation to Montana because we would be travelling part of the route Pirsig travels by motorcycle in the book.

On our drive back last week this inspired me to read my wife and sons one of my favorite passages from the book that happens to include a perfect summary of why vacations are so good for the soul (and for your work/health/life):

The gumption-filling process occurs when one is quiet long enough to see and hear and feel the real universe, not just one’s own stale opinions about it. But it’s nothing exotic. That’s why I like the word.
You see it often in people who return from long, quiet fishing trips. Often they’re a little defensive about having put so much time to “no account” because there’s no intellectual justification for what they’ve been doing. But the returned fisherman usually has a peculiar abundance of gumption, usually for the very same things he was sick to death of a few weeks before. He hasn’t been wasting time. It’s only our limited cultural viewpoint that makes it seem so.

This “vacation mind” is so valuable to sustained creative work (and building digital identity systems is nothing if not creative) that I’ll do everything I can to sustain it throughout the rest of the year. So if you see me looking like I’ve “gone fishing”…that’s exactly right.

Whoever thought we’d be using blogs for vacation notices? But until we have real Internet-wide presence service, it seems much more sane than problem-prone email bounce-backs.

So count on me to be completely offline (and I mean completely) until August 4th. I’ll blog more on why when I return (in complete bliss).

The new announced Information Card Foundation has nine community board members, and I’m pleased to report they all have a keen sense of humor. Case in point: Pam Dingle’s bio on the Board of Directors page:

Pamela Dingle

Pamela Dingle is an Enterprise Identity Consultant at Nulli Secundus Inc . She is also the founder of the Pamela Project, an open source project dedicated to creation of information card relying party modules & plugins for common web frameworks. Pamela blogs at http://eternaloptimist.wordpress.com and is an active participant at the OSIS Identity Commons Working Group supplying tests and maintaining the wiki for Interoperability events at various conferences. Pamela enjoys adding URLs to every sentence she writes (http://heresabunnywithapancakeonitshead) and hopes you click on them all.

If you haven’t heard of VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) yet, you will soon. Not that it will be an overnight phenomena – that’s one of the points Joe Andrieu makes in his mini-FAQ about VRM. But read Joe’s post to see why in many ways the emergence of VRM is as inevitable — due to the steady evolution of Internet identity and data sharing technology — as the emergence of CRM systems was in the 90’s — due to the steady evolution of database technology.

The Magic Include Shell took my blog offline and finally compelled me to move it to new hosting quarters, upgrade to WP 2.5.1, install a new theme, and add OpenID and information card support – all thanks to the magic of Stas Zubalevich at Parity.

If your WordPress suddenly goes wonky, I highly recommend this article about the Magic Include Shell. Nasty stuff.

Glad to be back online for the Internet Identity Workshop starting tomorrow – it’s gonna be a dousy.

Ryan Janssen has posted another interview in his series on digital identity, and I daresay that if you’ve ever met Doc Searls, you can just feel his energy and passion about VRM coming through in this writeup. Highly recommended reading. Doc has been right about many things, and ultimately I think VRM is going to be one of the most important.

Nowadays I find myself orienting my entire year around IIW (the Internet Identity Workshop). DO NOT miss it if you want to seriously intersect with the user-centric identity community. This year it will include a follow-on Data Sharing Summit on May 15, illustrating how the focus is slowly moving to the most important capability enabled by UCI.

See ya there.

Ryan Janssen pinged me via my contact page last week to ask if I had time to share the story of how I came to be working on XRI, XDI, OpenID, i-cards, Higgins, and Identity Commons. He reached me this afternoon and we talked for almost two hours. Boy, did it bring back memories. I’m so focused on building out working identity infrastructure and applications based on all these standards and projects that I rarely have a moment to reflect on how many twists and turns (and dollars) its taken to get here. So this was a full-out stroll in the park.

He’s posted an overview and will be writing more as he talks to others who have been pounding away forging this Internet identity layer. Ryan’s really done his homework too — he even included a link at the end to the original XDI white paper that co-chair Geoffrey Strongin and I contributed at the start of the OASIS XDI Technical Committee in early 2004. Wow, did that trip off the old synapses. Most fascinating is seeing the original proposed XDI schema which had just four elements. Four years later, after numerous twists and turns (and by my count 23 intermediate proposals), the XDI RDF model has…four elements (plus the XDI wrapper element). It’s not the same schema (now it’s based on the RDF graph model) — and in fact the preferred serialization is no longer even XML (it’s X3). But it’s uncannily close.

Deju vu all over again…

Although I saw snippets when it first came out, I sat down tonight to watch An Inconvenient Truth end-to-end with my wife and two boys, and I was blown away by how powerful a message it still delivers. In fact Al Gore has done an update that brings it current within about a year.

It’s simple: SEE THIS MOVIE. Then vote with your conscience, and your feet, and your wallet. Nothing is more important to the life of this planet and especially our kids.

Identity Woman (Kaliya Hamlin) posts about why current “friend formats” like FOAF and XFN don’t satisfy the need for privacy and personal control of data that she – and many other women – want before they are comfortable sharing personal information online.

She mentions that XRI and XDI provide this capability. Chris Messina comments that:

As it is now, there are few applications that actually support what
you’re talking about in terms of giving you fine grained control over
your relationship lists… It’s something that I hope is coming down
the pipe but is not something that has to do with the format; instead
it’s all about consistent citizen-centric access controls over their
data.

Let me explain why I believe it does indeed have “something to do with the format”, and thus why XRI and XDI are so relevant to this problem.

The core idea is that to provide the control Kaliya wants — over who has access to what parts of her profile — you can’t tie the access control format down to a specific blog, domain, application, or i-broker that you are using. You need the access control format to be as portable as the data it is controlling, or else we’ll never get to real portable data – data (and relationships) you can “take with you” across different communities and applications as your life and work evolves.

XRI and XDI provide a open standard way to do this. They break the problem of portable access control into two parts. The first part is a portable addressing format — a way to address the data being controlled that is domain- and application- independent. That’s the job of XRI (Extensible Resource Identifier). It enables a layer of abstract addressing on top of any network-addressable resource that enables portability of data across domains and applications.

The second part is a portable format for expressing the controls an individual (or other data authority) wants to assert over access and sharing of their information. That’s the job of XDI (XRI Data Interchange), a very simple XML format in wich every node of a data graph is XRI-addressable. Within this graph, certain nodes are used to store the access control metadata. In XDI these are called link contracts.

Link contracts are are the portable access control format Kaliya is asking for. As she mentions in her blog, XDI link contracts have already been implemented by Andy Dale, Steve Churchill, Barry Beechinor, and the team at ooTao in a large scale data sharing project for La Leche League International. ooTao used the original XDI data graph model, called the Authority/Type/Instance (ATI) model, For more about this implementation, see Andy’s blog, The Tao of XDI.

An even simpler XDI data graph model, XDI RDF, has since been developed based on the RDF graph model. To see examples of what link contracts look like in the XDI RDF model, see the current XDI RDF Model writeup.

With the XRI Resolution 2.0 spec going final (public review will begin next week – I’ll blog more about this shortly), I look forward very much to diving much deeper into XDI RDF and link contracts at the Internet Identity Workshop, coming up December 3-5 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

Paul Madsen has done a nicely illustrated post on the taxonomy of i-cards supported by the Higgins project. He makes a great point about how SAML cards (”s-cards”) could fit in, both in terms of third-party cards and self-issued cards. As I posted previously, I’m excited about seeing SAML integrated into the Higgins framework.

My only quibble with Paul’s diagram is that it shows r-cards (relationship cards) as a subset of m-cards (managed cards). If anything, it’s the other way around — an m-card would be a specialization of an r-card. But actually they are disjoint, the same way Paul shows the r-card and p-card circles in the self-issued set.

UPDATE: Paul has fixed this, and the diagrams are fine now.

The subject is actually very deep, as there are some interesting ways in which r-cards can emulate both m-cards and p-cards. But that’s a deeper subject than I have time for in this post — hopefully I’ll get some time over the holidays to go into it more.

I just noticed that Paul Madsen made a post about my recommendation that folks check out Joe Andrieu’s comments on the MS HealthVault announcement. Paul got my attention by titling his post, “Drummond, it’s Hailstorm“.
Just to clarify: I wasn’t recommending HealthVault. I was recommending Joe’s blog post about it, and most notably the large open issues regarding data portability — what Paul Trevithick calls “zero lock-in”.

Paul, thanks for helping clarify my intent.

Joe Andrieu, one of the leaders of the VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) community, has posted a good initial assessment of Microsoft’s first foray (post-Passport) of storing personal data for consumers via their Health Care Record initiative. It’s well worth reading his assessment of how this really legitimizes the market for “personal data stores”.

Since that’s one of the primary use cases for which XDI is being developed as a protocol and Higgins is being developed as an open source projects, there will be much more to say about this in the coming months.

No, I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth. But this has been a summer of big transitions — big enough that it will take several posts to cover it all.

Yet on this, my first day “back to school”, I want to share the simple observation that the value of “vacation mind” is vastly underrated. Robert Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (don’t get me going on that book) doesn’t use that phrase precisely, but he does refer very eloquently to that heightened state of energy and creativity you enter into after you’ve been out fishing for a few days and have completely relaxed inside and out. Once your mind is truly “off” things…

…suddenly it’s able to get “on” things like never before.

I’ve experienced it every year now for four years running (after two-week plus summer vacations) and I can’t rave enough about it. I come back to an explosion in new ideas and perspectives that seems to drive me forward until at least Christmas.

There’s great juju there. I look forward to exploring that phenomena in more detail once there’s a breather. But there’s not going to be a breather for quite a while. After Brad Fitzpatrick’s and David Recordon’s Thoughts on the Social Graph set a wildfire last month on the topic of social network portability, and now with Marc Canter, Joesph Smarr, Robert Scoble, and Micheal Arrington publishing a Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web; and with Marc and Kaliya facilitating the Data Sharing Summit starting Friday…

…this new “school year” at the University of Digital Identity and Data Sharing is going to be a whopper. And fresh from vacation mind I’ve got a huge backlog of topics to write about. I’ll squeeze them out as fast as I can squeeze them in.

Joe Andrieu, one of the pioneers of the VRM movement, wrote an inspired blog post on how not just VRM, but user-centric identity as a whole, can enable a radical rethinking of how systems integration can work. If you put the user at the center of the system not just from a “control” standpoint, but from a data integration standpoint, all kinds of new possibilities arise.

What’s really eye-opening about his post is the way he puts it in the context of Einsteinian relativism and an AI concept called “stigmergy”.

You have to read it. In his conclusion, Joe notes:

Sure, there is still a lot of work yet to be done. We have to figure out the protocols and technologies for what data vendors actually share in that data-store and how we assure reliable, always-on access in a secure and privacy-protected manner. Fortunately, as I mentioned earlier, the user-centric Identity meta-system is addressing a huge portion of that.

If ever there was a clarion-call for XDI as a protocol for doing exactly what Joe envisions, this is it.