First Aniversary of Identity as a STAGS

Identity became a STAGS — a Subject That Actually Goes Somewhere — not much more than one year ago, at the Fall 2004 Digital Identity World in Denver.

That was the first time Identity moved out of the corporate monolith-to-monolith realm and into the personal peer-to-peer realm we also call the Net. Up to that point, most of the talk at DIDW, for years, had been about "federation".

That topic had positive meanings, sure; but to individuals it all looked like what I unkindly characterized as "large companies having safe sex with each other using customer data". If you can't parse that, don't bother. The perspective is what matters. And that's what changed at that show. For the first time, Identity began to get personal. The grass roots began to grow together and cohere into something truly new and interesting.

A bunch of people — Drummond Reed, Jamie Lewis, Kaliya Hamlin, Fen Labalme, Craig Burton, Owen Davis, Kim Cameron, Johannes Ernst, Andre Durand, Eric Norlin, Phil Windley, Bill Washburn, Marc Canter and others — began to connect at that show and in the weeks that followed. Kim Cameron started Identityblog and began to write his laws. Phil Windley and I gave a progress report on the 14 December Gillmor Gang.

Then followed this post by Dave Winer and this one by yours truly, in which I said "identity needs a Dave Winer", among other things. Then, on New Years Eve we gathered a huge gaggle of folks to talk identity, including Dave.

After that the snowball started rolling, big time. The Identity Gang now has a wiki home at the Berkman Center, meetings and workshops happening... and now a coming together (out of the last workshop) of YADIS (felicitously named by Brad Fitzpatrick of OpenID and much more), which stands for Yet Another Distributed Identity System. To quote the wiki,

There are several projects concurrently working towards decentralised identity or single sign-on. Many of these use URLs as identifiers. YADIS was initiated by LID and OpenID. After the YADIS session at the October 2005 Internet Identity Workshop, the XRI folks working on i-names joined the effort as well. YADIS is applicable to any URL-based identity system, such as Sxip or mIDm, and by no means is tied to OpenID, LID, or XRI. For more information, please take a look at the individual project sites and at the Yadis FAQ.

Meanwhile, Dave has hardly been idle, working his butt off on OPML. Recently he vetted Spam-reduced owner identity in OPML, and the conversation has come back full loop to the Identity Gang, and to what Johnannes Ernst calls "the rapidly growing consensus to use URLs for digital identity".

Nothing is finished here, of course. But snowballs are rolling. And this is a Good Thing. Kudos all around