Add to iTunesKaliya Hamlin - Identity Woman (and Dale Olds)
Introduction
Kaliya is probably best know as Identity Woman on the web. She’s recognized as one of the though leaders in user centric identity. Having helped organize Identity Commons and lead the Internet Identity Workshop. She also surprised me and had Dale Olds join at the end of the podcast. Dale is a distinguished engineer at Novell and leads work on the Bandit project.
Links
- Kaliya’ Blog - Identity Woman
- Open ID
- Internet Identity Workshop
- R/WW Post on Map of Identity Landscape
Transcript
| 1:10 | Sean Ammirati: Kaliya, thank you very much for joining me today.Kaliya: No problem.Sean Ammirati: If you wouldn’t mind to start actually by just talking a little bit about your background and then we’ll get into the community that you’ve been leading for the last couple of years.Kaliya: So, I have an interesting path into tech. I started out after college working in the non-profit sector. Folks were coming to events and stuff and they give you this white piece of paper at the end your really great weekend event and they would say “Good luck building a social movement.” You know, with everybody’s name and email on this white piece of paper.
And it wasn’t really working. You know, I thought “Hmmm maybe there is a flaw in the technology there” and that got me inspired to think about social networking, tools and applications and, you know, this is before Friendster happened. This is when you’d send the word “Social Networking” and people look at you like you’re a kind of strange. So the community I was involved with, PlanetWorks, was thinking about, you know, social benefit organizations and linking them together and the role that identity played in helping that all work well together. |
| 02:22 | Sean Ammirati: Great. And then, for the last couple of years you’ve been known as Identity Woman –Kaliya: Yes.Sean Ammirati: …running the Blog “Identity Woman” which I guess is where that’s evolved to. If you were going to give somebody the elevator pitch on user-centric identity and they had no previous knowledge before your elevator pitch, how would you describe it to someone?Kaliya: Really, it’s about giving people the freedom to move around the web with the identity. Just like we move about the world with our bodies? Now I’d see you on one context and then you show up in another place I go “Oh! That’s the same person because they’re walking around in the same body.” So on the web, we just have handles and there has been no standard until very recently where I could move from one context to another context and take that identity that handle with me and would prove that I’m the same person. |
| 03:24 | Of course, giving people the freedom to aggregate across the network of sites. Instead of having a username and password that’s different at every single place you go.Sean Ammirati: Obviously some people would be familiar with examples of that in the Read/WriteWeb audience. But maybe you could talk about how we got to this point where we’re beginning to see some of this ability to sign on using a single handle? You know, what the progress was like from when you first started working with this movement to now? How did this all come to be?Kaliya: Yeah. So when I started it was the spring of 2004 and there’s one kid on the Identity Block. You know, other than, there had been Microsoft Passport but that wasn’t getting adoption. There were the “i-names” folks and I got involved with their sort of handle single sign-ons vision. |
| 04:22 | And, I met more and more people like in that Doc Searls and through him met Phil Windley and then there was Kim Cameron who was at Microsoft thinking about Identity. So this whole little snowball effect started happening and people thinking about end-users and identity. And we would meet at other people’s conferences and we started to call ourselves the “Identity Gang” because we’d go to like PC Forum or Digital Identity World and we’d have a 2-hour meeting.And those were great but we knew we needed more time to really flush the user-centric point of view and not just be barnacles on other people’s conferences that were focused on enterprise identity or other topics entirely. So we founded the Internet Identity Workshop and at that event in the Fall of 2005, our first one, we had all the different user-centric protocols present. |
| 05:21 | So there was i-names, and LID and OpenID version 1 and SXIP and they all presented on the first day. And on the second day we did Open Space and they all started talking and saying: “Well, how our are systems similar because if all four of us go to market?” They’d say, “No, my single sign on system is better than your single sign on system.” Maybe none of us are going to win and we wont to achieve our goal which is really just a web-wide single sign-on that empowers people.So, out of that came Yadis and from that has emerged OpenID version 2 that, although more complex than anyone of those original solutions, we were just like incorporated different aspects of all of them. It has been a really great story of cooperation and collaboration in that community.Sean Ammirati: So OpenID is something that, personally, the product that I have responsibility for delivering in the marketplace FeedHub has taken advantage of and I know that it continues to get pretty wide adoption. What is the current state of the state for OpenID both from a number of people who are offering up OpenID’s and then number of sites that are accepting it for sign on? |
| 06:31 | Kaliya: So the latest statistics that I have for site accepting and for sign on, is from September and it was 6,000 relying parties and growth was at 1,500 relying parties a month. We should be up to like 8,000 relying party sites at this point. But that doesn’t sound like the whole lot in some ways given the number of websites on the internet.But some of them are major sites. And that’s only looking through the lens of one identity provider that releases statistics on the sites that it’s seeing its user-base sign into. The other thing has happened and I think this is where the potential is. There is always this chicken and egg problem, right? You need identities that work with the system and then you need places you can use them, right? Chicken-egg. |
| 07:27 | Sean Ammirati: Sure.Kaliya: And what happens is large provider like AOL have said, “Okay. Every single one of our screen name has an OpenID and because our users can’t really use it in that many places, we’re not actually going to promote the fact that they have it to them. But this, you know, this large pool of OpenID’s that are there, the potentiated OpenID’s, that people don’t necessarily know they have them but they could know, right? There is now, I think, 116 million of them.Sean Ammirati: Right.Kaliya: So, okay. I’m on a relying party unlike you. I’m going, “Hmm! Should I put this into my product or not?”; “Well, hmm. In six months from now or a year from now, you know, some large percentage in the millions, you know, with members in the millions; these people are going to know they have an OpenID. Then maybe I should put it in. |
| 08:25 | Sean Ammirati: Well, that has actually been our experience. We’ve actually been, really pleasantly surprised at how many people have chosen to use their OpenID to create a FeedHub account. I want to be interviewing here, but I think there’s also an issue of sign up fatigue on the web right now.Kaliya: Oh, yeah.Sean Ammirati: Where people are just like “yet another site” and that ability to not try to remember another password to simplify the registration process is huge on the web right now. So clearly we’re seeing this OpenID movement start to gain momentum and kind of out of that user-centric starts to gain some momentum. What are some of the other things that you would point to as interesting happenings on the web that are coming of this movement you’ve been part of facilitating for the last couple of years?Kaliya: Obviously, the big announcement this week has been OpenSocial. It’s still not, all the details we’ve seen have not come out yet. And it’s not totally clear to me how it all weaves together. I think that’s something the whole industry is going to be exploring for the next month. |
| 09:29 | You know the OpenSocial stuff itself is part of a trend that our community has been a part of in saying “how do we empower people?”How do we empower people to own and manage their own data across the web? And these are both technical and social problems. One is, technically, how can you do it? And two, how do you socially do it? And I don’t know that we have all the answers yet. I’m concerned about privacy with OpenSocial and I hope that it will be addressed.Sean Ammirati: It’s okay if you don’t know this but do you have any sense of what OpenID’s role may be in OpenSocial? |
| 10:21 | Kaliya: I’m guessing. And this is where I need to read more but I think it’s going to be one of the critical elements in articulating their social graph across context and being able to link things together. I think it’s going to be one of the major topics on our agenda at the upcoming Internet Identity workshop.Sean Ammirati: …which is a good transition point? So there’s probably people listening here who are responsible for creating a product. They’re either at a large internet company or an entrepreneur or consultant. If they want to get engaged with this community, what is the best way to do that? Is it the IIW meeting?Kaliya: Yeah, that’s the best way face to face. I mean obviously there’s the, you know, if you want to go dive in to OpenID there’s an OpenID mailing list and their website which is OpenID.net. But if, you know, in terms of face to face engagement with the leaders and experts who’ve been driving this forward, IIW is definitely the place to do that. |
| 11:27 | I mean I want to turn this around and actually ask you because you came for IIW for the first time last, you know, in May.Sean Ammirati: Right.Kaliya: So, what was valuable about it for you?Sean Ammirati: I would say that the most valuable part of it was meeting the people and also just coming to really understand how everything fit together. I will say it took more of the time than I think it will this time. Just from getting a quick overview before the interview today on what the IIW meeting agenda will look like this time.
But understanding sort of the map of the landscape of how these different protocols. And if I have said “Oh, I want to use OpenID” like the best practices to do it as well as also how the different pieces talked together was hugely valuable. And the community did a great job across the couple of days educating me on that. But I think this time around, hopefully we’ll even pull forward more of the things at the beginning so that people can understand that landscape right away and then directly go to engaging with the community about how their web-app can take advantage of these tools as well. |
| 12:34 | Kaliya: That’s our goal really. It’s to create a space for both corporate, your situation from my point and like immediately trying to figure it out as well those people who this will be their fifth Internet Identity Workshop and they want to dive in and keep doing the work they’ve been doing: moving the standards and the protocols and the code and interoperability forward.Sean Ammirati: So the next IIW meeting is the first weekend this summer, correct?Kaliya: Yeah. September 3 - 5.Sean Ammirati: Okay. So the third to the fifth. If I did go to IIW what would the experience be like? |
| 13:16 | Kaliya: On Monday afternoon, we start at about 1 o’clock just so folks can fly-in in the morning. And we’d go over the map of the landscape of the different projects and where we we’ve come from as well as, you know, basic concepts like the relying parties and the agents which are tools on the desktop that users use to manage identity and then the identity provider. And go over, have short presentations on all the different elements in the community.Sean Ammirati: Right, for what it’s worth, I’ll put up a post from Read/Write web the last time I was at IIW and took all this in. But I do think will be hugely valuable for people. And then, how do Tuesday and Wednesday work?Kaliya: So Tuesday and Wednesday are really fun because we create the agenda the event happened and even this week I was like “I’m so glad we do our events this way,” because clearly OpenSocial is a huge topic. |
| 14:26 | And there’s a lot that needs to be discussed about it and now, as many sessions as needed to happen about it can happen because we didn’t program our event to six months ago.Sean Ammirati: So, you talked about OpenSocial. Any other topics that just, you know this community as well as anybody, any other topics like that you think that would be hot topics for this IIW?Kaliya: I think the community, there’s a mass of, you know, it’s OpenIDs with super simple, easy single sign on. It doesn’t necessarily address more complex use cases and there’s the next generation of tools and protocols that’s being proposed. And actually it’s moving into working demonstration code now with Higgins. So it will be interesting to see where that progresses. But that’s more like forward looking. That those tools aren’t necessarily like, we can’t implement them right now on your website. |
| 15:24 | Sean Ammirati: Sure.Kaliya: They’re the things to think about if you are looking, you know, out the next 6 months to 18 months about where these tools are going. Or going to be there and discuss and you can have an input.Sean Ammirati: One final question I would have for your is what do you think is the most misunderstood thing about user-centric identity?Kaliya: I think that people think it’s about having only one identity and having that one identity link to quote “your real identity and use it on your driver’s license” which you did then. It’s about giving you the freedom to have a few identities like under 10 rather than 300.
Hey Sean, so here’s Dale Olds and I had him called because he’s one of our, he’s been to every IIW. Sean Ammirati: Oh, great! So this is a pleasant surprise for me as well. Now maybe you could just give us an overview of who you are too, so people understand the context for your answer? Kaliya: Yeah. |
| 16:24 | Dale Olds: My name is Dale Olds. My interesting title is Distinguished Engineer. I work for Novell and what I do is, my real practical title is, I am the lead, technical lead and head janitor of the Bandit Project. The Bandit project is an open source project sponsored by Novell that builds various identity components.We work a lot with other projects like Higgins and Camelot project and IIW because our goal is to build a consistent fabric of identity, how that ultimately benefit to my employer, is we can then have a larger market that sell identity management products. And so it’s, I believe it’s a win-win situation. |
| 17:19 | Sean Ammirati: Great.Dale Olds: I’ve always been really fascinated by identity issues - online identity issues. So, IIW is, in my mind, the most influential, most significant workshop in this space. I went to, what I believe it was the first one. It was the one Berkeley?Kaliya: Uh hmm.Dale Olds: And I remember walking in and thinking what have I done?
[Laughter] Dale Olds: What have I got myself into? I’ve joined a “hippy commune” and we’re going to sit through Berkeley and think deep thoughts about identity. But, [Laughter] Sean Ammirati: Was that true? [Laughter] Dale Olds: Well it’s, the things I’ve heard Kaliya say about “unconferences” when they talk about, that the things that really happened in conferences is what happens in the hallway and between sessions and the ad hoc sessions. |
| 18:25 | And that the point of the unconference format was to, the open space format was to try to facilitate that and accentuate it rather than deny that it’s there.Sean Ammirati: Yeah, I think that’s true and it’s a great point that sort of the open days on Tuesday and Wednesday really do a lot. The knowledge in the audience helps shape and make sure everybody gets maximized as the return of their time spent there.Dale Olds: Yeah. I think that because of, from my perspective when I first showed to one of those things as a corporate developer.Sean Ammirati: Right.
Dale Olds: I experienced a little bit of culture shock but to kind of contrast it, my opinion of a regular conference, you go, you sit in sessions and you often sit in sessions that are thinly-veiled sales job for some other vendors approach. |
| 19:24 | And then hopefully you sit around the halfway after and have some informal conversations, go for coffee or go to the bar later and you make a few industry contacts and collaborate here and there on things. Whereas the experience that IIW, especially this back in two days, you go in there and if you try to sell your product, nobody will show up at your session.But if you say here’s trouble I’m having, will you all show up and help me solve this? You’ll get your competitors. You’ll get friends, neighbors, you know, new found friends will come and discuss with you and help you solve the problem. So it’s an interesting experience. I learned to get along with Microsoft there.Sean Ammirati: Wow! Well, if you can do that –Dale Olds: Well, that’s from my history and my employer, that’s saying something. |
| 20:16 | Sean Ammirati: It’s actually, I think, a great endorsement for IIW. While we have you on the phone, be curious for your answer to this as well. What’s your perception for the most misunderstood part of user-centric identity, this whole?Dale Olds: Actually, Kaliya’s answer is really good because sometimes I get so wrapped up in this, in the technology itself that I forget there are people that still think we’re trying to make a single identity on the internet. It’s so far from that, I want to take the opposite approach.I want it to be distributed. I don’t want there to ever be a single authoritative source of identity information. In my mind the key aspect of user centric is that the user participates in the flow of the information. I often hear people say that it has to do with does the user own their own information and I think that that’s kind of a dangerous path to go because the user actually owns very little of their own identity information. |
| 21:24 | But they can participate in the flow of who gets the information. And in my mind, the critical concept of user-centric identity is that I want to be able to have multiple accounts, multiple sources of identity information but there isn’t a single place other than my head where all of those things can be brought together. In other words, my head is centric in corresponding all of the sources of information that say something about me. It’s not necessary that my head owns all the information about me. I don’t own my social security number.Sean Ammirati: Actually, I’d be curious in getting your take on this question as well. So how do you see OpenSocial relating to user-centric identity? |
| 22:13 | Dale Olds: Well I would actually thought about putting up a blog entry about that with all the stuff about OpenSocial right now because that applies to people who actually have a social circle. For those of us who don’t, we’re only interested in actual identity as a point, not identity as a -[Laughter]Dale Olds: That was a joke.[Laughter]
Dale Olds: I do actually have enough friends, relatives and neighbors that, I think, the OpenSocial stuff is wonderful. It’s the next step up. One of the things that I have often Blogged about and talked about is that we talk about identity all the time. But the only reason to identify something implies a relationship. If I am identifying something that means I, one identity, is referring to another identity. There’s a relationship there. Even the fact of saying “identity” or identifying something implies a relationship of sorts. The whole point to have an identity is so that it can be in relation to the other things. |
| 23:23 | So this idea of a global social fabric, I think is a natural outgrowth of being able to have things like OpenID and user-centric and the whole notion of an internet identity is what makes these things even conceivable. I have no idea where it’s going though it’s fascinating to watch. |
