Eric chimes in, Andre too (indirectly) on Digital ID
Eric Norlin posts thoughtfully, but mistakenly I think, on the whole Digital ID debate. Citing an article by PingID's Andre Durand, he suggests that people do not "own" this dimension of their identities:
Tier 2: Corporate Identity - A T2 identity is both conditional & temporary in its issuance to you. We typically denote these identities as being assigned or issued to us, and they typically refer to us in the context of a business relationship. For example, nearly every 'identity' we have with a business is a T2 identity, our job title is a T2, our cell phone is a T2, our United Mileage Plus is a T2, our social security is a T2. T2's comprise the bulk of our digital identities today.
I think we have the right and the responsibility as consumers to be able to revoke the use of our identity. One function of identity in the future will be like the eBay ranking system (see Ross Mayfield's comment on my posting about eBay), which appears to denote reputation by simple quantity of people who have done or do business with someone. We should be able to revoke a company or organization's ability to say we are a customer or a member, should we not? So, T2 identities are conditional with regard to our grant of the use of our identity, not the other way around (in which the commercial relationship is appended to, rather than our identity being appended to a corporation's, as Eric and Andre argue it is in the case of a United Mileage Plus membership).
Where Eric believes it is impractical to imagine all identity under one roof, I think it is perfectly manageable compared to the complexity of a completely distributed system. Having spent a lot of time working with the ideas of a chaordic organization, Eric rightly points out that PingID or the Identity Commons are restricted by their organizational charters (being corporations), but that is simply because we have not addressed the need for new kinds of corporate structures and tax regimes to deal with the ideas that were pioneered by VISA. Whereas a completely distributed identity regime has not been achieved, a choardic organization like VISA has, and is now the largest financial entity on the planet.
Believe me, it is hard to design the documents that govern a chaordic company. I'm in the midst of drawing up contracts that will put a chaordic audio/video production and network development company in place. My goal is to make it work within the current tax and business structure (which will cripple the company's ability to grow to a degree) in order to demand changes in the corporate governance and tax structures after making it work for a few years.
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at December 30, 2002 01:23 PM | TrackBack