Stream of Consciousness

Joi Ito wrote today about Global Voices (blog, wiki) which is “a name, an identity, a watchword to ward away the chills of restricted expression. A place for coordinating ideas; a source for inspiration; an optimistic, collaborative manifesto“. This is a very cool project and about the best thing I can think of to blog about on a holiday honoring the birth of a person who loved and respected all human beings.

And at the same time, I see many challenges. One of which is creating technologies that will enable people to read what they want and to publish their ideas - and maintain control over them - without fear of retribution. (This is also a primary goal of 2idi and the Identity Commons.) There is a project just underway aimed at giving all the people of Costa Rica a virtual identity (perhaps using i-names) with emphasis on the poor so as to help the distribution of aid and supplies where needed the most.

Let’s all get together and make the better world we envision real.

Stephen Downes makes some observations that are indicative of some of the misunderstandings that surround i-name technology. I will briefly address two issues in particular:

I-names can be free

While so-called “global” i-names cost money, there are at least two type of free i-names, and I expect the large majority of i-names issued will be free. First, “community” i-names, which are delegated from a globally rooted organizational i-name, will, in most cases, be free. (Of course, it’s up to the delegating community to charge for them if they wish to.) Then there’s the wide open frontier of i-names that use a cross reference as a root, which enables a fully distributed P2P and/or DNS-based community root system. (This may also give you an idea of how completely open-ended the protocols are.) All that said, the current (limited time fund raiser) offering of 50 year global i-names for $25 is, IMO, a very good deal.

No governance required

But most civil society finds a certain amount of governance to be useful. It’s a good thing that people in this country drive on the right side of the road and that murder is illegal. In the online world, mailing lists like to limit posts from trolls or advertisers and K-12 forums like to limit (e.g.) sexual language. The Identity Commons is proposing an identity-based governance framework that enables member communities to decide for themselves what rules they will allow for inter-member and inter-community communications. For example, while a community may limit unrequested outside advertising (spam), it may allow - and even encourage - intra-community advertising. XDI-based negotiation mechanisms will enable communities to define their rules (XDI contracts) and their i-broker (such as 2idi) will enforce these contracts.

Our open APIs and open source vision are aimed at giving people 100% control over their personal identity information. It distresses me that there’s so much misunderstanding out there. At the same time, it’s understandable, given the identity systems proposed so far (e.g., Passport). The bottom line (IMO) is that we’re really on track to creating the identity services framework that will enable anyone to use it however they want to use it. That’s simply the way it should be.

Olivier Travers writes of the need for open APIs. We at Identity Commons consider open APIs to be crucial (as well as open governance, open privacy and security mechanisms, etc.). Not only are the technologies used by 2idi to implement the IC platform based upon open standards and code (LAMP, XRI, XDI and SAML/Lasso), but all 2idi core software will be dual (BSD/GPL) licensed. In addition, we will be explicitly working with service providers of all types to create more and better open APIs so that they can more easily use the open authentication model. It may sound counterintuitive, but not only do we want to have as many people and applications connecting to us as possible, but we also want to encourage a multitude of providers offering services compatible with ours - all part of our open source plan for success.

As there will be other identity models in existence for a while (after all, we’re coming in rather late to the game) we will work to create interoperability where possible. Of course, since 2idi/Identity Commons is the only initiative that I know of that is aimed at a fully open system giving its users total control over their identity - including where their information is stored - some of the other identity providers that we interface with may have less than the desired level of compatibility.

One of my favorite technology bloggers, Jon Udell, mentioned Identity Commons in his blog today. But even he got a part of the picture wrong. I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but we’ve got to get our message clearer.

John quotes Owen Davis as saying that [global] i-names will be priced similarly to DNS names. My goal (and I believe Owen shares it) as founder of 2idi.com (the first i-broker) is to provide [community] i-names for free as soon as possible. While global i-names will continue to cost money, local or community i-names can and will (in most cases) be free. Basic hosting will be free, too, and the cost of services will tend towards zero. Furthermore, as the interesting things happen on the edges of the ‘net, delegated community and sub-community i-names will be where all the action is.

So where is the business model when everything is free? To conjure an old joke: volume! We plan to provide a trustworthy and valuable service that, because of our open source business model, people are not locked into - rather, they choose to host their i-names with us. Once we are securely giving one, maybe two million people total control over their personal information, communities will form that have certain needs that we will be in an excellent position to service. And with that buying power, there will be marketers tripping over themselves to get access. Since our customers - and the communities that they make up - are in control, true permission-based marketing becomes possible. As we connect willing, qualified buyers with the products they are seeking, it should be easy for 2idi to skim (say) 1% off of the discounted purchase price, and everyone wins! (For more, see these musings.)

To Jon’s final point, after working on privacy protected personal profile systems for 25 years now, what excites me about Identity Commons is the planned chaordic governance model that is of, by and for the members. Building secure, reputation-based identity and transaction systems requires either a larger-than-usual degree of personal knowledge and responsibility, or a flexible, federated, community governance system to fill in the holes. I’m betting on the latter.

Wow - we just got Slashdotted! (And our servers seem to have withstood a sustained load over six times what their previous peak had been - whew!) Anyway, it seems clear that our messaging around how we work has got some holes in it…

First, it appears many people think that this is a centralized system. Actually, i-brokers, which are based on the open OASIS XRI, XDI and SAML standards, are not centralized. Well, they are now only because there is just one of them, but we have a project underway to package our code for release - under the dual GPL/BSD license - by the end of the year. At that point in time anyone can be an i-broker. As our business model is based on us being trustable (as people can easily move to any other i-broker if ours loses favor) it’ll simply have to be so - and provide an excellent set of services that cause people to stay with us.

Also, the fact that there is only one global i-broker may lead to some misunderstandings. While it is true that there are only two (primary) global namespaces - rooted in the ‘=’ (personal) and ‘@’ (organizational) global context symbols - there are two other types of namespaces that open the system wide open. Community i-names, usually rooted with an organizational ‘@-name’, allow each community to create its own local namespace. For example, I’m “broadcatch” in the Slashdot namespace. Every community can create as many local namespaces as it wants to - for free!

The other primary global namespace, which opens things even wider, is the concept of rooting a namespace on an XRI cross reference. This will allow roots based on cryptographic public keys, among other things, and will be ideal in peer-to-peer systems as a vehicle for creating truly decentralized i-names.

Finally, besides the fact that i-name users have i-name portability that enables easy movement between i-brokers, the data that the i-broker manages for them can reside anywhere - including on their personal systems. There is no requirement that the data be stored at the i-broker - in fact, a basic i-broker has no mechanism for such data storage!

More later…