Kaliya Hamlin sent along this note about the upcoming IIW:

Internet Identity Workshop (IIW), Dec 4-6, 2006,
Computer History Museum, Mountainview CA

The Interenet Identity Workshop is about moving user-centric identity ideas and technologies forward. User-centric identity starts with the individual, and his or her needs. It does not start with enterprise or technology vendors, although plenty of those have been involved in user-centric conversations and development projects form the beginning.

User-centric identity is about working relationships and services between individuals and retailers, employers, membership bodies, and organizations of any kind. It is not about a centralized solution, or anybody's silo. As such it solves different problems than the familiar ones of providing authentication and authorization services within a single organization, or federation between different organizations.

User-centric identity is an extremely active and growing conversation involving many converging development efforts -- by open source communities, by vendors large and small, and by customers of all sizes. Internet Identity Workshops are where Mozilla, Microsoft, IBM, Novell, Liberty Alliance, WS*, Verisign, Red Hat, SixApart and many other projects and companies meet to work toward common goals and real solutions. They are joined by customers of all sizes as well. You won't find a higher ratio anywhere of real productivity to idle chat and marketing BS that are typical to many conferences.

Internet Identity Workshops are informal and purpose-driven. In every IIW so far, a high degree of progress has been made, within and between separate development efforts. IIWs also serve as the main forums for face-to-face meeting of the whole user-centric identity community.

The workshops are organized by a working group within Identity Commons, and are run on Open Space practices and principles*. There are no formal presentations, no keynotes, no panels. Instead, topics are vetted and chosen by participants when the workshop convenes, and open meetings are organized and scheduled for the day that follows. Given the paths of various development projects, however, we expect the following to come up at the workshop:

* Technical protocols, frameworks and proposals such as: OpenID (Sxip, LID, i-names, XRI, Yadis), SAML, Identity metasystem, CardSpace, i-cards, Open Source Identity Selector (OSIS), XDI, itags, Identity Schemas and the Higgins Project.

* The nitty gritty of how to do implementation for startups, large existing customer bases, political campaigns and nonprofit adopters.

* The user experiences of identity systems - what do we know? what do we need to learn more about?

* Legal and social issues like identity rights agreements, reputation, privacy, anonymity, etc.

* Exploring emerging use cases for an identity layer in markets such as user generated video, innovative economic networks, attention and intention brokering, lead generation, user-driven preferences, and social networking.

Still wondering if it will be good or not? Read what folks said about the May 2006 conference. http://iiw.windley.com/wiki/What_is_GREAT%21

The following was originally posted in a different forum, and after some discussion, Phil and I thought that over time this thread might become relevant to Digital ID World as well. We shall see ;-)

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I've been thinking a lot lately about the whole "measurement of new media." My thinking is by no means clear on this, but I wanted to start writing some of it down.

Traditional media measurement is all about mass. Amass a large amount of viewers, and then assume that some of the mass will convert into sales. Its the classic "funnel approach." That funnel is the *entire* business model of traditional media and advertising -- and you'll notice, its linear. Insert variable on one end of equation, exert force, expect result on other end of equation -- LIN-E-AR.

Google altered that just slightly with adwords by adding a *bit* of self-selection. No longer is the *mass* sitting passively and being fed content. Now they actively search on a term and are served up relevant ads, whereby a click through shows some amount of self-selected interest.

Its a good innovation -- and it took an incredibly inefficient model (tradtional advertising) and made it more efficient. But it is by no means an *efficient* mechanism. Google is straddling the divide between "new media" and old media, but it is not crossing the chasm. The reason: while Google added new variables to the equation, it still is operating on a linear model.

"New media," or whatever you want to call it (search, blogging, podcasting, social networking, etc), is not linear. Its core quality is that it is a networked model -- much like a rainforest, or marketplace, or economy. A network cannot be accurately measured via linear equations. It requires networked understandings and networked measurements.

The big problem that "new media" needs to solve is how to measure the *quality of engagement* of an audience, and how that engagement serves to scale to other interested parties in a networked environment. THAT is the metric that creates the next powerhouse "media company." Someone needs to crack the dynamics of networked engagement....which, by the way, is a big part of what I think Brad Feld is circling around when he thinks/talks about the "dynamics of information."

Solving it means thinking about how ecosystems and networks deal with the dynamics of engagement. Time to pull out those old science of complex adaptive systems books. Time for some heavy winter reading.

Has anyone solved this yet? Not even close. Until they do, we'll just be stuck feeding mass into the funnel so that sales magically pop out the other end of the sausage machine.