Announcing the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW2005)

Phil Windley // Mon Aug 1 05:35:00 2005

There's been considerable conversation around identity on the Internet, or what some would call grassroots identity. Providing identity services between people, websites, and organizations that may or may not have any kind of formalized relationship is a different problem than providing authentication and authorization services within a single organization. Many have argued that the lack of a credible identity infrastructure will eventually result in the Internet being so overrun with fraud as to make it useless for many interesting uses.

To solve this problem, or pieces of it, companies and individuals have made a variety of architectural and governance proposals. Some of these include:

Kaliya Hamlin, Drummond Reed, Doc Searls and I are hosting the Internet Identity Workshop in Berkeley on October 26 and 27th (Note: this changed from 25th and 26th) to provide a forum to disucss these and other architectural and governance proposals for Internet-wide identity services and their underlying philosophies. The workshop will comprise a day of presentations on Internet-scale identity architectures followed by a day of structured open space to accommodate the range of topics and issues that will emerge from day one and other issues and identity services that do not fit into the scope of the formal presentations. We're hoping that adding a little more formality to the conversation will aid in digesting some of the various proposals.

We're inviting presentations for the first day on the following topics:

Problems, issues, politics, and economics of Internet-scale identity systems.
Architectures for Internet-scale identity systems
Philosophies that drive architectural decisions in these systems (see Kim Cameron's Laws of Identity for an example of such a philosophy

If you'd like to present on some other topic, drop one of us a line first and we'll see how it fits in. Prospective presenters will be asked to submit a 250-300 word abstract. We hope to accomodate everyone, but we may end up picking from the abstracts.

I'm excited about this and looking forward to it. I hope we can have a good set of presentations the first day and a solid day of discussion the second. If you're interested in this sort of thing, I hope to see you there. Please read the full announcement for some other details and register if you're coming. There is a $75 charge to cover the cost of the venue, administrative expenses, and the cost of snacks and lunch both dates.