Pushing String

The Managing Identity in New Zealand conference has been an amazing experience. The organizers did a superb job constructing a uniquely valuable event, reflecting the thoughtfulness that’s present everywhere in the NZ government’s approach to its citizens’ identity.

I hope to have more time very soon to put together lots more thoughts on the many talks and conversations, but for now I just wanted to share the slides for the keynote I presented on Tuesday: The Design of Everyday Identity.

And one additional thought for now: I’m extremely sympathetic to the views of Doc and Adriana regarding the oddity of the phrase “user-centric”. I’ve remarked many times on the problems with assuming that people are always online and in front of a user agent (that is, “users”), and the very word describes people relative to the systems that are supposed to be helping them, which seems backwards — especially since the systems don’t seem to be too inclined to actually help them do what they want to do!

My research for this talk led me back to the classic ideas in Don Norman’s usability work, where he invoked the phrase “human-centered design” starting back in the 80’s. I would happily switch to “human-centered” from “user-centric”, and I suspect it would help us all be more open to the many ways to achieve this goal, particularly if Don Norman’s cautionary tale is kept in mind.

(As always, you can find my presos and papers and such linked from my Publications page. See that page if you want a more extensive bibliography for the talk, and keep an eye out for the conference proceedings paper I’ll be finishing in the next couple of weeks.)

It’s that time again — we’re just a month away from the deadline for the ACM Workshop on Digital Identity Management call for papers.

The theme, as always for this series, is timely: “Services and Identity”. Might Pat et al. be interested in submitting something on accessing attribute services in SOAP and REST environments?

The fedlet — it has arrived! Actually, it’s hard to keep things a total surprise when you open-source it all, but Daniel Raskin has finally taken the wraps off the fedlet for real. Check out his video: He demonstrates, during the course of a single Guns ‘N’ Roses tune, just how brain-dead easy it is to create a fedlet for a SAML2 relying party and get it working correctly on the other side.

As Scott Cantor observed in the recent Project Concordia workshop, we’re getting to the point where browser-based single sign-on Just Works. Now it’s going faster, and faster, and faster… (Hey, don’t some G’n'R tunes do that?)

In keeping with its pragmatic approach to identity, the New Zealand State Services Commission is making its identity services friendlier and more responsive to people’s real needs. Part of this is a rebranding effort around “igovt”. Good stuff!

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Colin Wallis, Bill Young, and Danny Mollan of the SSC on various efforts, such as the recent Project Concordia workshop activity. I’m really looking forward to the identity conference in Wellington, NZ next week — not only ’cause I get to experience the locale (though who could resist that??) but also because I’ll get to meet up with these folks and meet many others I know only as disembodied voices or by reputation.

The only potential downside: I heard today that I might not be able to carry knitting needles onto the plane. I can’t seem to verify that with an online source; it looks like they’re allowed. If anyone can confirm or deny, let me know! I should probably take heed of this Plan-B advice…

[UPDATE: Arrgh. Right on my itinerary it says “In the interest of security and safety we would like to advise customers that sharp items and cutting implements of all types and sizes such as pocket knives, scissors, nail files, corkscrews, letter openers, knitting needles, realistic toy imitation weapons, razor blades etc, must be carried in checked luggage only.”]

(BUMPED because the free online copy of the article is now available. Entry originally posted April 10, 2008 @ 10:02 am.)

Drummond Reed and I undertook a fun and productive collaboration over the last few months, co-writing an article on The Venn of Identity for the new special issue of IEEE Security and Privacy magazine (here’s IEEE S&P subscription info).

The issue as a whole looks to be full of juicy stuff, with a good flow from more general topics (our article is a level-setter) to more specific and technical ones. Also, don’t miss the additional perspective Patrick Harding offers on his “dynamic SAML” article.

By special arrangement between Sun and IEEE, I’m able to make the Venn article available without fee. I haven’t gotten a final PDF copy back yet — the publishers are busy at the RSA conference this week! — so if you’re interested to snag it, note that I’ll update this entry — as well as my Publications page — when I get the file. (Update: Here you go!)

(And one more UPDATE to acknowledge the forebears of the Venn diagram since these wouldn’t fit in the article: Gary Ellison, Johannes Ernst, and Paul Madsen. More details on this history can be found in my initial post on the subject. Thanks, guys!)

It’s surprising which “worlds” can work together given a chance:

(See whole photo essay here)

Paul is onto something with the notion of Project Concordia supporting the formation of creoles where we’ve been having to make do with pidgin.

It’s as if the kids, impatient with the limitations of the pidgin, decide to create a real language on their own.

If you were at the recent Concordia workshop, you might have noticed the palpable impatience on the part of deployers there. (If you couldn’t attend, you can have that special being-there experience by checking out the complete workshop notes, which I finally finished typing up last night after returning from my Honolulu Hiatus…)

We’ve got a next-steps telecon tomorrow, and if you were thinking about taking part in Concordia discussions, now’s a great time. So be akamai and check out the wiki for call info and how to join the email list.