Identity Woman

I didn’t get that much of a vacation between christmas and New Years because I was working on She’s Geeky. We are doing it a gain the women’s technology conference - this year I think we have better timing January 30-31 (not being a week off from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing).

We had a lot of fun last year and I think this year we will have even more. The Computer History Museum is going to show us a movie they have about Ada Lovelace (the first programmer).

So why this conference? A few reasons:
When the first BlogHer came a long I was soooo excited because I thought it was going to be all girl geeks - cause all the bloggers I knew worked in technology. Well, it wasn’t it was full of wonderful women but they were, fashion models, and horse back riders, and cooks and just lots of things but no where near a majority of them were geeky women.

I love the identity community deeply. I would say some of my best friends are among you. At the same there are very few women, so few I can almost count them on two hands. This is ok, it isn’t going to change and I am not complaining. I did think about once in a blue moon I thought it would be a lot of fun to hang out with just women working in techie fields and learn about what they do. When you get out into more specialized and niche areas the number of women seems to go down. Last year (fall 2007) a woman who works in Firmware came to the conference who thought she new all the women who worked in her industry - turns out she met two more at the event. These new contacts have been really important to her.

Eugene Kim wrote a great post last year about She’s Geeky and the patterns that it embodies for collaboration.

Last year we had women arrive after reading the article that was in the SJ Mercury News who were retired. This year we hope to reach more of these women out reaching via the Computer History Museum.

We are working with almost all the different women in technology groups to spread the word - Women 2.0, Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners, Gaming Angels, LinuxChix, DevChix, Anita Borg Institute….The number of them is amazing - She’s Geeky is NOT a women in technology organization - we are just an event an unconference for peer to peer learning amongst women from a whole range of technology communities.

WE have a ton of links for different useful things about the event - today and tomorrow Tues and Wednesday are our blogging days so if you feel inspired these are the days post about it happening :).

Video from last year’s event.
In physical paper form Posters 8.5×11 & Post Cards

Twitter http://www.twitter.com/Shesgeeky

Upcoming Yahoo!
Facebook Group
LinkedIn Group
Links to images for blog posting.
Little Rectangle - http://www.kaliyasblogs.net/shesgeeky/SGlittle.jpg
Big Bubble color - http://www.kaliyasblogs.net/shesgeeky/forwebcolor.jpg
Big Bublbe black and white - http://www.kaliyasblogs.net/shesgeeky/ShesGeekyforweb.jpg

This post was on slashdot today

Protection From Online Eviction?
from the our-data-our-selves dept.

AOL has been shutting down its free Web services, in some cases with little or no notice to users, and they are not the only ones. This blog post on the coming “datapocalypse” makes the case that those who host Web content should be required to provide notice and access to data for a year, and be held strictly accountable the way landlords are before they can evict a tenant. Some commenters on the post argue that you get what you pay for with free Web services, and that users should be backing up their data anyway. What do you think, should there be required notice and access before online hosts take user data offline for good?

Here are some interesting comments from it.
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1079453&cid=26315101

This is part 2 and continues from part 1. I will re post this caveat again.

I am not going to do a “top ten list” - not really my style. I tend to take things as they are and appreciate the amazing, wonderful, mysterious, sensuous, intellectually stimulating but don’t “compare” in a sort of ordered list way. So just so there is clarity on the number of things I mention I will “number” them but this is NOT a top ten list - I wrote this post as a reflection without thought to order.

(un5) The emergence of Portable Contacts was a great development out of the Data Sharing Events that I put on with Laurie. The conversation between Joseph and the MSFT guys (Indu and Angus) lead to this - sort of a practical low hanging fruit thing to do - rather then solve everything - just how to get the list of contacts I have in one place out and importable to another. Joseph’s community leadership has really impressed me to. He is all about getting things done and finding the needed elements to make things happen.

(un6) I have enjoyed watching Marc draw on his fence - yes he does this literally - and talk about his vision of the social web evolving. He “published” a book containing some of what he has been talking about. You can describe Marc as many things but I for one respect him as a visionary - ahead of his time in seeing where things will be going on the web and what will be needed. (You can see his predictions for 2009 here) Just as an example of something he said that really struck me as original and important to think about looking ahead - he talked about how groups need to live autonomously - outside any one platform or silo - and that we need a language of social verbs that are open and standard across them. Maybe some more people will “get” what Marc has been saying in this regard and some open standards can evolve to address this.

(un7) In a year end review it would be a mistake to not name the IDTBD conversation that happened this summer. You can read the whole thread of the e-mail conversation in the google group - it is public. There were in the end two different ways to look at how to organize (and I think they can complementary) one put organizational form and structure first and the other put relationship and community first and said that needed form and structure could emerge from that. In the middle of the conversation we were referred to Clay Shirky’s work - both this video about LOVE in technical communities and how it is very long lasting and sustaining and his book - the power of organizing without organization. (He also has another talk about Coordination Costs that is informative). Identity Commons is an organization being held together with many of the new super low cost tools that mean organizational overhead that was needed to organize people as organized as we are isn’t needed like it was 5-10 years ago. Having said this there is much to be improved and in the survey we sent out after IIW we asked about IC and the community wanted us to focus on supporting/providing better communication between groups and also increased PR/outside world awareness of the collaborative work happening in the community.

(un8) The OpenID Foundation part of the Identity Commons community held its first elections for the community seats on the board.

(un9) Information Card Foundation launched and is part of the community of Identity Commons. I have been quite impressed with the energy and evangelism of Charles Andres. (they too are using a low organizational overhead model for getting things done). I actually got a the Azigo card selector working on my Mac and downloaded a “managed” card from an early behind the scenes trial of CivicID. I also failed at getting an “I’m over 18 card from Equifax” - Actually the experience of their knowledge based authentication made me think my identity has been “stolen” it asked me about a bunch of loans I haven’t taken out. So now I have a bunch of personal identity detective work to do this year (I will be blogging about those adventures).

(un10) Parity Communications shipped some pretty amazing stuff and it has been a long time coming*. They are behind the Equifax I’m over 18 card issuing site using their service called Card Press for issuing information cards. (as an aside I “get the whole stock photo with people holding their hands in a card shape - but why the girl with no top on?)

* Some background I first talked to Paul Trevithic and Mary Ruddy in the winter of 2004 while working for Identity Commons I knew I had to go out and meet them - to learn what they were up to and hopefully link/sync it with what Owen, Andrew & Drummond&Co. were up to around user-centric identity. They were into Social physics along with John Clippinger and both Paul and John were at the 2004 Planetwork Conference.

Over all it was an amazing year and it seems that the coming year will continue to have this field evolve.

I am working hard on pulling together two events before the next IIW (May 18-20 - put it on your calendars). One is specifically focused on “What are the Business Models” we should have an announcement about that next week but the dates will be the last week of Feb.

The other is focused on the intersection of identity technologies and the legal realm - I am meeting face to face with Lucy Lynch from ISOC in Eugene this week to work on details for that.

The Identity Futures group continues to percolate along and is working on developing a proposal to do some scenario visioning/planning.

I am hoping to spend some more time thinking about and talking to women to understand more about their needs and practices around identity online. Just in the last week while organizing She’s Geeky (the women’s only tech conference happening at the end of January) two women have mentioned they have had online stalker experiences recently. Several also have very particular ways of presenting themselves one example is a woman who professionally they use their first initial and last name - when they submit resume’s etc and in their general life online/socially they use their First name and last initial - to ensure that they are not findable at least by an employer initially doesn’t know their full name and thus their gender.

I don’t write about politics on my blog that much but have spoken up about some of my travels in the world and what I have seen.

I thought with all the twitter blips going by about “the ground invasion in gaza beginning I wanted to share what I wrote about in the summer of 2006 my own personal visit to Gaza in the summer of 2000.

This is the last 1/2 of a post a post called “Security theater and the “real” threats - inhuman conditions“.

Speaking of ‘they’ - who are they? I just watched a film from Netflicks - Death in Gaza. It was of two documentary film makers one of whom died while shooting the film. I spent the summer of 2000 in Jerusalem for 10 weeks I lived and worked there and did what I call “NGO tourism”. I worked at one of the worlds foremost human rights organizations - BTselem the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories and then also worked at the PCATI the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (while there I got my education in what torture is going on and how it affects people - really awful).

My fellow international interns and I would spend our weekends traveling about going through the Westbank and up to Nazareth, and Haifa over to Televiv down to Hebron. [[you can read what I wrote about Hebron here]]

One time we got to go to Gaza for 2 days. One of the interviewers for B’Tselem was traveling there so the two of us got to go with him. We got hooked up with two guys who worked in an NGO in Gaza and went on a tour for a day… from one end to the other … inside the camps and everything. It was amazingly powerful. Just like in the movie I saw the little kids the ones who are 5 and 6 happily playing away not really knowing there life circumstances yet. Then the older boys would glare glints of anger in there eyes. They are 10-13 years old knowing what they don’t have. The get that it is not normal to have open sewers in the streets. It is not normal to have 10 people living in one room. It is not normal to be growing bunnies up stairs that you kill to have food or a donkey living in your living room. Why do they know this…there are satalite dishes…basically everyone has a TV and can see what life is like in Isreal, and America and the rest of the normal arab world. When you think about that maybe some of this makes a bit more sense. It is not normal to feel like going to school you could get killed (as they young girl in Death in Gaza talks about). It is not normal to have your school playmates killed by gunfire (like the little boys have happen to them in the movie). Or bulldozers coming to plow your house down in the middle of the night (like threatens to happen in the movie ) How can you feel peaceful in this kind of environment?

I know after witnessing what I did that day I was shaken. I really felt my soul had been shaken up like my body was still and it was moving. It was eerily like the feeling I had after exiting the memorial museum at Hiroshima. The thing was…what I had witnessed that day was happening to real people ‘now’ not a historical event from 60 years ago. The depth of suffering is quite intense and the failure to connect with people as people and to really resolve the conflict continues to cause suffering. More bombs and planes and threats of nuclear weapons going off doesn’t make the situation better. It makes it worse. Send in armies of compassionate empathetic listeners. Make public peoples family stories and histories. Find some way through. There are some amazing stories of reconciliation that have happened in Israel/Palestine. They prove it is possible. I do have hope but not if everyone just sees an enemy instead of people, families and societies with real human and community needs.

I was sorting through my stuff over the weekend and found something from B’Tselem. They still send me the reports the write. It was a 11×17 fold over about the wall situation in Jerusalem. Just really disruptive to normal peoples lives. The whole of the Westbank is oriented around the trade flows through main cities. The most main one being East Jerusalem. The fact that they want to cut the Palestinians off from their main economic hub is just mean. People don’t like people who do mean things. Why is this so hard to understand!

It makes me very sad to hear there is a war happening. There has been a war on the Palestinian people for a long time.

Some elements that are not obvious to people is the depth of connection to land and history that is present along with the really bad living conditions.
* In the refugee camps villagers who fled their villages together - still live together 50 years later - they have a sense of identity as people of a place (a place that only the oldest people alive still remember) but that the young people feel they belong to too.
* The number of people and the conditions of living are very hard to imagine - they have the density of New York - but all in cement block houses that have tiny rooms 9×9. 1200 people a km.
* They don’t have electricity in the winter because the wiring is so ad-hoc that it is to dangerous to run in the winter.
* They don’t have sewage systems - other then the ones that run in the street.
* When the Israelis had a presence in Gaza they had their own roads - the good ones - that Palestinians could not drive on. (I was driving around with palestinians so we were on the “bad” roads).
* They have families of 10 living in one room houses.
* They have families that have a donkey’s living with them in their one room too.

These are extreme living conditions and the reason they voted for Hamas has to do with the fact that the islamic organization the religious arm of the political organization actually helps poor (as they are called to by their religious texts) impoverished people by feeding them. If you lived in these kinds of conditions wouldn’t you vote for the group that on the ground in practical reality actually helped you a bit.

There are some other interesting things to know about the Palestinian people… How do I know all this - yes I visited the territories but I wrote my senior thesis 40 pages on “The Lost Opportunity for Sustainable Development in Palestine” - 10 of them specifically about demography.

* They have HIGH levels of basic education Palestinians have the highest levels literacy in the arab world.

* They have a lot of higher educational institutions.

* They have the highest level of educational attainment of women in the arab world (normally educated women cut back on the number of children they have).

* Even though the women are relatively very educated - they are very committed to having children and lots of them

Women living in Palestine have a total fertility rate (TFR) of 5.6 children—significantly higher than women in other countries that have similar levels of education and access to health services. (Women in Gaza have 6.6 births, on average, while women in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) have an average of 5.2 births.) they are clear they are fighting a long term demographic “race” with Israel. More palestinians means more votes and more bodies to resist the injustice they have suffered.

* They have a very young population (in 2005 - 18% was below the age of 5, 45% was below the age of 15) this means that is lots of young men of marriageable age and seeking work.

So you put all this together
1. a population that watches TV from around the world on satellite dishes,
2. that lives in abject poverty
3. That is highly educated and mostly in the arts (political science, economics, english, comparative literature etc…)
4. Young men without an economic opportunities compounded by the fact that without this they can’t marry and thus can’t have sex. THEY ARE FRUSTRATED.

They know - they see every day on TV what they don’t have. We live in a globalized world and it is not just about ‘us’ those in North America and Europe knowing about the rest of the world - the rest of the world has the same tools too. They see the gap - with their own eyes and it makes them angry.

I don’t want to be all down on this post. This went by on twitter a few days ago It is about a contributor/admin on WikiHow (the wiki for how too manuals) and it made me cry - it is why I love the internet and the power it has to connect people and give people meaningful ways to contribute and help one another.

Many of you know that the dedicated wikiHowian and new admin, VC, lives in Gaza. (Actually VC is only a new admin on the English wikiHow. He has been an admin on Arabic wikiHow for a while.) And everyone knows that there is currently a war in Gaza right now. Even before the recent fighting started, VC suffered from sporadic internet access caused by electrical outages. So I felt lucky to get this email reply when I asked how he was surviving the war:

Quote:
It is terrible indeed, however, it is kind people like yourself and other wikiHow editors that keep me going on, sane and to some extent even happy that I have friends who really care about me without even really ever seeing me. Thank you very much for asking and checking on me. I’m safe and sound and so is my family and my friends. The circumstances however are hard on the children, but with some tenderness, love and patience, they’ll get through it (or so I hope). The area where I live in Gaza is considered relatively safe as it is the center of the city.

It is in rough and extremely hazardous situations like these that we usually need something to hold on to … to believe in. wikiHow and its community has been that and more to me. It was and still is what I turn to so as to find comfort and peace of mind. The wikiHow community members are so supportive and kind. When I set at the computer and start doing anything related to wikiHow, it is currently my only escape outlet where I can, for some sweet moments, forget about the war, the harsh circumstances and the suffering all around me. And when I see a message by one of the editors, whether discussing some wikiHow related matter or simply saying “hi, how are you”, it makes me feel … alive, not cutoff of the world outside … having what I call a “universal family” that cares and comforts me.

For all of that Jack, I’d like to thank you for founding this wonderful family, making it possible for me and many others to feel at home no matter what.

I am not going to do a “top ten list” - not really my style. I tend to take things as they are and appreciate the amazing, wonderful, mysterious, sensuous, intellectually stimulating but don’t “compare” in a sort of ordered list way. So just so there is clarity on the number of things I mention I will “number” them but this is NOT a top ten list - I wrote this post as a reflection without thought to order.

This morning while swimming I got to reflecting about the year in identity and it did seem appropriate to share some of them.

(un1) Bob’s Relationship paper (that I hope Burton Group will release into the world) was put forward in draft form at IIW#7 (2008a) and the Data Sharing Summit in May. It framed the problem of identity and articulated some missing pieces to the puzzle we are solving - supporting an identity layer emerge. He high lighted the fact that identity happens in the context of relationship and finding ways to document the terms and conditions in a relationship - making the relationship itself its own node and not just a line in a social graph. Since the paper is mostly been available to enterprise clients of the Burton Group and some folks in the identity community this missing piece - the node of relationship itself has not been taken up. I am hopeful it will emerge. I think some of what the Higgins project is proposing as an R-Card - a place to co-manage relationship data between two parties in a transaction could for fill this.

Update: I spoke with Bob since this post and Burton will be releasing this paper in Q1.

(un2) Facebook’s emergence as the dominant social networking service and this being the anti-pattern that the communities that I have been participating in for 6 years now had articulated was a danger that needed to be addressed preemptively with open standards that worked between silo’s.

(un3) Related to this - I am remember that summer at the invitational gathering at Hollyhock (a retreat center in Canada I love and I became the accidental poster child for) I got to meet with colleagues who lead workshops there some of whom I have known for years. They knew I was into the web and social things there - “digital identity” but this year they “got” more of what I was talking about. The reason was because of issues they themselves had - one had pictures and e-mails and other things the community had put forward around someone’s life threatening illness. They found they couldn’t get the data out. … it wasn’t there. People informally in conversations I overheard were kinda freeked out by the service (you need to remember that in Canada Facebook has incredibly high penetration into the lives of “normal” folks about 40% of all Canadians are on it - so more normal folks then in the US).

So back to the open standards working between sites - putting at least doors between walled gardens - it seems that finding the agreement and finding adoption of such open standards is difficult - or perhaps more to the point it is not a “high business priority” - it is easy to have a big network just grow and become the default. I think the efforts of the open stack community are noble and I hope they succeed. I also think they need to address some of the things that facebook messes up. These include mushing all my worlds together- (water polo from when I was in highschool, kindergarten class at school, water polo from college, water polo from the national team, highschool, elementary school 1, elementary school too, my process facilitator community, the identity community, the all the worlds I am in they are all FLAT - my social reality isn’t flat. People and the topics I am interested in at any one time come closer and go out father. I have divers interests and everyone I know is not interested in everything I do. I know this. I am not trying to “hide” anything or “be secret” I just want to respect the attention of my friends. I hope this nuanced social understanding can be grasped by someone building these tools. It is not that complex.

It may be that this kind of nuance will show up in smart clients. I am hopeful that this year there will be at least one for twitter. (I want to have two kinds of twitter friends - the ones that I read ALL their tweets (scrolling back to see what happened when I was not online) and those that i will watch passively when I happen to be online too.

(un4) TWITTER really broke on to the scene this year. I started tweeting because of Phil Windley’s comment about how it got him connected to his remote team - as a water cooler replacement - to know what they were up to in daily life (I had had an account for about a year before but hadn’t gotten into it). I was also at a talking heads forum on collaboration for a day in January and several friends were there who were tweeters so I did the laborious work of finding people to follow (back then there was no people search - you sort of found people by who you saw following people you knew).

I have several more thoughts about big things of the year. I will continue to write in the next few days. I am going to get back into blogging. These last 8 months since IIW#7 2008a I have had some rather significant personal life background noise. It is why I haven’t been writing or getting out much. So one of my resolutions for the year is to blog more.

It continues here with Part 2.

This article is fun. I found it on the blog I regularly watch that has the best of the Colbert Report and the Daily Show (usually about 5 min a day for each- they are both currently off the air so there are no clips on the home page)

Obama: Full-on geek or just ‘nerd-adjacent?’: Some experts contend President-elect too cool, too athletic, too normal

Obama is good at “repressing his inner geek, but you can tell it’s there,” especially when he goes into nuanced explanations of technical matters, said Benjamin Nugent, author of the book “American Nerd: The Story of My People.”

[[I am reading this book right now - it is great]]

“One imagines a terrifying rally of ‘Star Trek’ people shouting, ‘One of us!’” Nugent said, in an interview conducted by e-mail, of course.

Others see only some geek qualities, qualifying the president-elect as merely “nerd-adjacent.” After all, he’s an athlete and kind of cool, some experts demur. Still, there’s enough there for geeks to celebrate.

Psychology professor Larry Welkowitz of Keene State College in New Hampshire hopefully speculated that there’s a shift in what’s cool and that “smart can be in. Maybe that started with the computer programmers of the ’90s. The Bill Gateses of the world are OK.”

Mary Hodder is one of the 8 experts Fast Company tapped to predict evolutionary trends for web 2.o in 2009:

Mary Hodder, Founder of Dabble.com and VP of Product Development, Apisphere

“The future of social media is user’s owning their data, deciding who to send it to. Look for more companies that currently host the user’s identity to have less control over that, as things like Open ID take over and more companies try to compete by giving users more control over themselves. Look for ways users can own their own data, and companies that might offer that, sort of like a personal information bank. The changes may seem subtle but I think we’ll see companies now, like Facebook, who try to be everything to you: your bank account for info, your identity, your tools for publishing, and your bar/restaurant for socializing, having to give up some of those roles or hold them less powerfully. And I don’t think it’s natural for one company to hold all that power. It leaves you with very little control over your online self.

Of course, Facebook will fight this to the last, so they won’t be the first to give up some of this control. Others will and eventually to compete Facebook will follow. But they are the great example of the problem.

The other big change will be in companies finally building for revenue in the social and any other space online, as they build for growth in their free or social products.”

She is clearly pointing to emergence of Vendor Relationship Management tools and also the possibility of information card technologies that give users more control along with OpenID and OAuth that are linking web 2.0 services. She highlights the ‘business model’ issue that still has not been figured out for social networks or for identity technologies. We are hoping to address some of this at a special session of Internet Identity Workshop focused just on business models this winter.

It should be noted that 5/8 experts tapped were women the other 4 are Charlene Li, Rebecca Moore, Susan Mernit & Tara Hunt.

Lucy Lynch posted this “The CSIS Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency ” to the ID-Legal e-mail list.

We are actually going to discuss it on our upcoming call along with figuring out our steward to Identity Commons. Lucy and I will be spending 2 days at the end of December face to face in Eugene planning strategy/execution/deliverables around having at least event in DC this winter/spring before the next IIW.

The CSIS Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency has released its final report, “Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency.” The Commissions three major findings are:

1. Cybersecurity is now one of the major national security problems facing the United States;

2. Decisions and actions must respect American values related to privacy and civil liberties; and

3. Only a comprehensive national security strategy that embraces both the domestic and international aspects of cybersecurity will improve the situation.”

There is a section on: Identity Management for CyberSecurity (page 67) that folks will want to read. CSIS is a Washington think tank, so this
is only advisory, but interesting to see some old models coming around again.

“CSIS was launched at the height of the Cold War, dedicated to the simple but urgent goal of finding ways for America to survive as a nation and prosper as a people. During the following four decades, CSIS has grown to become one of the nations and the worlds preeminent public policy institutions on U.S. and international security.”

Lucy Lynch posted this “The CSIS Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency ” to the ID-Legal e-mail list.

We are actually going to discuss it on our upcoming call along with figuring out our steward to Identity Commons. Lucy and I will be spending 2 days at the end of December face to face in Eugene planning strategy/execution/deliverables around having at least event in DC this winter/spring before the next IIW.

The CSIS Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency has released its final report, “Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency.” The Commissions three major findings are:

1. Cybersecurity is now one of the major national security problems facing the United States;

2. Decisions and actions must respect American values related to privacy and civil liberties; and

3. Only a comprehensive national security strategy that embraces both the domestic and international aspects of cybersecurity will improve the situation.”

There is a section on: Identity Management for CyberSecurity (page 67) that folks will want to read. CSIS is a Washington think tank, so this
is only advisory, but interesting to see some old models coming around again.

“CSIS was launched at the height of the Cold War, dedicated to the simple but urgent goal of finding ways for America to survive as a nation and prosper as a people. During the following four decades, CSIS has grown to become one of the nations and the worlds preeminent public policy institutions on U.S. and international security.”

So today Google Friend Connect and then Facebook Connect opened up their services today . Techcrunch is framing about dominance of internet identity.

The three horse race between Facebook, Google, and MySpace to achieve dominance in the internet identity space doesn’t appear to be letting up any.

What seems to be missing is the fact that Google and MySpace are implementing standards that are being developed in community and are open - meaning other players can play too.

Marc - long, long, long time advocate for open identity tools and systems on the web for people (he was talking about this at meetings I happen to run into him at in 2002-2003) does a good job of articulating the issues with facebook.

It’s all about about ‘Facebook across the Web’. Not about the Open Web.

ReadWriteWeb says this and

Open Source vs. Proprietary technology isn’t just about desktop software anymore - now it’s about our identities and social connections, all around the web.

has a nice little Mind Map comparing the two:

They invite people to edit it too.

This is interesting - Facbook is the “MAC” and Google is the “PC”
He likes Facebook because it has

* DEEP INTEGRATION
* REAL IDENTITY
* SOCIAL DISTRIBUTION

I find it strange the people like it cause it has “real identity” I don’t want to use it because FACEBOOK mushes me all together - I do have different communities of friends and interests. I don’t think they all care or want to know everything I do on the web.

This blog user found installing Google Friend connect a lot easier.

This is an interesting frame from MySpaceFaceTube

If there were an OpenID for Dummies book, its publisher would be Facebook Connect….
The remaining advantage for OpenID is that it doesn’t tether users to one service – since so many companies are now identity providers, just about everyone already has an account somewhere they can use on sites that accept OpenID logins….

And, according to Facebook, early testing of Connect shows a 50 percent increase in engagement on websites that have implemented it.

John McCrae had a good post about the announcements calling it the Birthday of the Social Web.

He links to this CNET post -

Sites will adopt Facebook Connect for two reasons. First, their users are already actively using it; millions of users have OpenID log-ins and don’t even know it. And second, because it’s not just a registration system, it’s that marketing channel.

I think this quote makes the point that it is TIME for all the major OpenID to educate the user-bases they have that have an OpenID and don’t know it that they have one and and how they can use it. Perhaps they can hire Common Craft to explain it In Plain English
One of the sessions at IIW that didn’t actually have notes submitted was about Activity feeds (in Session - I think getting an open standard for these and enabling users with this functionality is part of what will make a viable open alternative to Facebook Connect.

XRD - which is a key component of the open stack made a lot of progress at IIW.

I am quite hopeful that openness will succeed and purpose of Identity Commons to support, facilitate, and promote the creation of an open identity layer for the Internet — one that maximizes control, convenience, and privacy for the individual while encouraging the development of healthy, interoperable communities, will be fulfilled.

I thought you would all like to know about this event coming up December 19th in San Francisco. Learning about the Open Stack for the Social Web. It will be a great overview of the components of the “open stack” (although some take issue with this name - I think it will do)

These components are the alternative to Facebook Connect (or any other proprietary identity silo) LockIN. It is exciting to see all the progress that has been made and in particular the work coming out of this last IIW.

I am very proud of the fact we actually have collected basically all the notes from all the sessions at this IIW. They will be published in a PDF by the end of day today. Here is the link to the wiki with all the notes as well. The PDF will be be linked to off the top of the page.

It is that She’s Geeky time of year again.
This time we are having a conference on the East Coast Dec 5-7

We are having a full day of unconference fun on Dec 6th with a cocktail party the evening before and a bonus day of nerding out on Sunday the 7th. We have a Bailout Program too
We will have a 2.5 day conference Thursday to Saturday January 29-31 in Mounatain View.

This story does not have a happy ending
From Times Online:

A 19-year-old man in Florida committed suicide live on the internet as hundreds of web surfers watched - taunting him and offering encouragement.

Abraham K. Biggs, from Broward County, Florida, announced his intention on an online forum, posted a suicide note on another and then took an overdose of pills in front of his webcam, broadcasting his final moments on Justin.tv.

Mr Biggs lay on his bed motionless for several hours before members of the website became alarmed. With the video still streaming, viewers eventually called the local police, who broke down the door, found the body and switched off the camera. Up to 1,500 people were viewing, according to one report.

A video clip posted on the net shows a police officer entering the room, his handgun drawn, as he checks for any sign of life. Mr Biggs was a member of bodybuilding.com under the name CandyJunkie and was also known under the alias of Feels Like Ecstasy on Justin. tv. He had apparently threatened to commit suicide before.

The last post was about cybermobs emerging in the political fallout of proposition 8. This one at a personal level.

It makes me wonder how we can love and value life through the anonymity that the web gives us.

One of the major things that kids needed to be protected from articulated at the Kids Online conference last week was “themselves” this is a good example of this need.

I am Canadian so you can probably guess how I would have voted if I could have on Proposition 8 (the California constitutional amendment to define marriage as only between a man and a woman).
My views are not the point of this post. I am very concerned about what is playing out - online and in real life between the two sides of this issues following the passage of the amendment.

First of all we live in a democracy - the people of California voted for it - albeit by a small percentage but that was the will of the people.

When I look at this I think well the way the NO side wins is by doing all the work the YES side did last time - only better. They go and put an amendment to the constitution on the ballot and then build support for it.

The NO campaign assumed it couldn’t loose, was badly organized, didn’t have a comprehensive strategy for building support for its side across diverse communities throughout California. (The YES campaign was on the ground engaging with the black church community for example - they never saw anyone from the NO side come to their communities to engage them on the issue).

As the vote approach the NO side in a final very flawed move started attacking in television adds those who funded the YES side of the proposition and in particular the Mormon Church.

It was this turn of events that has lead into quite disturbing actions and behaviors by the NO campaign post election.

The blacklisting and subsequent public harassment and targeting of specific people and specific religious groups for their beliefs and support of YES on prop 8 is wrong.

I take this personally, I have and do work with people who are Mormon - (When I played water polo in university and in the Identity field). I respect the LDS church and the people in it - they have good values. Their religion is a very American one too (like Christian Science its origins are on this continent). Watch the Frontline/American Experience 4 hour documentary on the history of the church and their experience as a people/religious group.

A close personal family member I know also voted YES and for all I know could have donated.

When mobs start appearing at places of residence of YES contributors and their businesses. It makes me worried.

I thought about this issue earlier in the campaign when I wrote this post There are a lot of donkey’s in my neighborhood (and I know who they are)

From The Hive:

because she did about 60 gay ‘activists’ went to her restaurant and strong armed her in a scene reminiscent to Nazi Germany. They went down a list of people who gave as little as 100 dollars to boycott, harrass and attack them. They went there to ‘confront’ her for giving a measley hundred bucks based on her personal faith that she has had since childhood. They argued with her and it was reported by local news reporters was a “heated” confrontation.

So is this the America we want? Where if a private citizen wants to participate in the governmental process that they be harrassed and acosted. Their freedom of speech chilled by thugs.

From the NY Times:

The artistic director, Scott Eckern, came under fire recently after it became known that he contributed $1,000 to support Proposition 8…
In a statement issued on Wednesday morning, Mr. Eckern said that his donation stemmed from his religious beliefs — he is a Mormon — and that he was “deeply saddened that my personal beliefs and convictions have offended others.”

From the SF Chronicle:

Phillip Fletcher, a Palo Alto dentist who donated $1,000 to the campaign, is featured prominently on a Web site listing donors targeted for boycott. He said two of his patients already have left over the donation.

This is the site of the Anti Gay Blacklist Then there is a blog called Stop the Mormons.

The night Obama won and there was a party in the main street 6 blocks from my house - I had a moment of insight into the future. This was a happy celebratory Mob - it was basically safe. People were texting their friends and telling them where it was inviting them to join. I Tweeted about it so 900 people knew about it and where it was. I also knew that this new technology of texting and presence based real time information creates an increased capacity for mob formation. It made me wonder about the cultural skills and capacities we need to develop to interrupt mob behavior turning bad.

I think what is going on with the blacklists - that are directly targeting people in their private life is wrong. I think targeting specific religious institutions for protest is wrong.

These people and these religious insti