Doc has just put up a great “post’ on Suitwatch; it’s more an article than a post, and Suitwatch’s not a blog, but so what? Subscribe via this link if you want to read it.
Update: You can now read the entire article via this link at Linux Journal.
Let me tempt you with a few tidbits from the story:
Identity is a first-person matter. It comes from the inside, not the
outside. So does everything else we do as individuals. Which is why I’m
not just talking about identity this time. I’m talking about everything
that’s missing in everything we’ve been doing ever since we first started
calling computing “personal”, way back in the late Seventies.
All the identities in our wallets and purses, from social security numbers
to credit card numbers to library and museum memberships, are given to us by
organizations. More importantly, they represent “customer relationship
management” (CRM) systems that at best respect a tiny fraction of who we are
and what we might bring to a “relationship”. What CRM systems call a
“relationship” is so confined, so minimal, so impoverished and so incomplete
that it insults the word.
No matter how “user-centric” we make our CRMs, the fact that we burden the
vendor side with the entire relationship reveals how one-sided and lame the
whole system really is. Also how antique it is, in a time when individuals
are only becoming more empowered by digital technology and networking. It
doesn’t matter how respectful we make “federation” between CRMs of different
companies. The CRM system will remain broken until it appreciates, embraces
and truly relates to customers — not just as complex human beings, but as
entities with many other relationships, and as potential sources of highly
useful intelligence. Not to mention money.
As usual Doc hits the nail on the head.
If we want individuals to be valued, then we must also value those things that make individuals individual. An individual’s Credentials. History. Behaviour. Values. Relationships. Intentions. Even fingerprints and DNA. Whatever that individual wants to share with others. Whomever the individual wants to share with. Whenever and however that sharing is done. At the individual’s behest and choice.
[A number of useful links are also provided, particularly to what Steve Gillmor and his Gang have been doing in this space, as also the work being done by Drummond Reed et al.]
And no, this is not a mutual admiration society of A-listers like Doc and apparent A-lister wannabes like me.
I do not want to see, or be part of, a society that makes “agreeing with someone” a sin. I do not want to see, or be part of, a society that makes “cutting people down to size” and “belittling” someone in a Weakest-Link way something to be admired. What utter tosh.
I want to see, and be part of, a society that encourages people, that provides constructive criticism, that has covenant and not contract relationships, that believes in building people up rather than smashing people down.
“Identity is a first-person matter. It comes from the inside, not the
outside. So does everything else we do as individuals. “….”I want to see, and be part of, a society that encourages people, that provides constructive criticism, that has covenant and not contract relationships, that believes in building people up rather than smashing people down.”… beautiful, but these words are just a contemporary imagery… Through reflection we can have a pale sense of our identity, but we can`t compare. We need others to compare.. to obtain an identity… and a convenant is, by definition a contract. The contract, well done, is our freedom, that socio-politically means democracy… We need all these kind of principles to define us as humans. I live in a country that has just a few years of freedom in the recent history, so i felt all these boundaires… Its not so funny, even if it sounds poetically. Anyway, congratulations for the pozitive initiative and look forward to the meanings.
JP, as usual, you (and Doc) have very admirable values; and, as usual, they are up against some very harsh realities. The harshest of these realities is that promoters of new technology seem to have an innate tendency to be sloppy in their use of language (just as Kenneth Burke observed that political platforms are long on rhetoric and grammatically careless, as I may have mentioned in another comment). After all, the sloppier you are, the harder it is to pin your offering down to anything specific; so I am afraid is it a little bit naive to assume that anyone promoting CRM has any serious acquaintance with a concept as subtle as “relationship!”
As a case in point, consider this interview run in CRM News last June:
http://www.crmbuyer.com/story/51165.html
Consider, also, the link to my Talkback entry, the only one I can recall submitting with a flame icon! While the interview is supposed to be about how Dell has “improved” its customer service, there is never any mention of the fact that, at the end of the day, successful customer service arises from effective engagement through communication. Remember, the primary functionality for customer service in CRM is a database of scripts to walk the call center operator through an incoming call. At their best these scripts are innocuously inadequate; and at their worst they are actually Trojan horses for cross-selling (as was recently revealed when some AOL scripts were disclosed). None of this does a relationship make!
There is also at least one other important lesson to be gained from reading those scripts: They all seem to be based on the assumption that all problems reside on the customer side. In other words the vendor is never wrong! Can you imagine a worse way to begin a “relationship?”
Personally, I think that today’s problems of identity go far beyond the inadequacies of “relationship” technology to live up to its name. Think of the language we encounter today about “network organizations,” “boundary-less organizations,” and “virtual organizations.” Think, then, of the extent to which our personal identity is shaped by the environment in which we work. Well, as that environment becomes more and more virtual, what will be its impact on our own sense of identity! Given that this sense of identity is tightly coupled to our sense of consciousness, not to mention our “knowledge,” what is to become of us as functioning individuals if our environment is deliberately undermining that sense of identity?
We have a user-driven identity infrastructure already: the OpenPGP Web of Trust.
http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/id_fraud.html
The problems with it are in usability, not architecture. Currently PGP and GPG usability is terrible, but the fundamental operations are simple and could be integrated into network client software, cash machines, and other places.
Shouldn’t companies be working on interfaces to a simple system that works instead of having expensive Identity Conferences with golf tournaments? (Look how Interactive Television worked out.)
For example, when people generate an identity, the software should print hard-copy revocations in bar code, pre-addressed to several services that offer to scan and post to keyservers. Then put the revocations and instructions in your safe deposit box. If your “identity is stolen” just revoke it and establish a new one.