Mobile wallets hit cash-only Japan

From the BBC: "Mobile wallets take off in Japan".

Japan is a country of such contradictions: reading the article you'd think that the whole country is going digital, yet the reality is that in 2005 it's still impossible to pay at very many restaurants and supermarkets with anything but cash.

Then again, here we are with Japanese "mobile wallets", which look set to leap-frog Western personal banking technology. Japanese culture can appear frozen in time in some ways for great stretches of time—then, all of a sudden, the nation seems to turn on a penny!

Technorati Tags: japan, mobile_devices, e-cash, paradox

YADIS wikipedia entry

I had a stab at a definition of YADIS on Wikipedia. Please feel free to dive in with improvements and additions!

Identity Rights—Virtual Rights by another name?

Phil Windley reports back from an interesting discussion on Identity Rights Agreements at the Internet Identity Workshop 2005.

This afternoon there was a good sized group that got together to discuss Identity Rights Agreements.

One big problem is the legal status of such agreements. Mary Rundle was very helpful to the discussion here.

One point was that an organization (like Identity Commons) could create a “trustmark” that Web sites that take identity data could display saying they agree to abidee by IRAs. This provides some prtection under trademark law, but may not be the best way really punish violaters.

Data protection privacy commissioners want to create a regime for protecting personly identifying information. What we’re saying in the discussion of IRAs is that we can build systems that allow users to easily indicate their privacy preferences, at least for some classes of data. What’s missing is the legal framework in the middle to make such agreements legally binding.

There’s two sides to this: identity owners and identity consumers. I’ve thought of IRAs being about the identity owner side. There’s the other side of trustmarks that indicate what a site’s policies are.

We shouldn’t have a fixed set of artfully designed icons, but rather a set of choices that lead to the agreements. This is basically what Creative Commons does: make some choices, end up with a few fix choices.

Ultimately, we need to think about negotiation. What if I don’t want my credit card stored, but the site policy is to store it. I don’t want to enter a negotiation to see whether I or they are willing to compromise.

I-names and other systems creating identity records seem like a great place to start. The interface could let users select IRAs for each identity data field and then be responsible for packaging it into the standard for wrapping identity data (be that hCards, vcards, or something else).

IRAs aren’t about technological (DRM) or even legal enforcement, although ultimately legal enforcement may be possible. IRAs are about expressing preferences. If users can express their preferences, service providers can start to cater to them and advertise their willingness to cater to them.

As what people seem to be looking for seems to be closely related to our work at the Virtual Rights Initiative, I posted this comment:

Hi Phil,

Sounds to me what you talk about is very close to what we're aiming at as a first step for the Virtual Rights Initiative <www.virtualrights.org>.

Given that VRI already has several senior legal figures behind it, perhaps it would make sense to gather behind that banner?

We've mooted the idea of combining CC-like hyperlinked badge(s) with a Pledgebank fundraising campaign. This could enable VRI to become an effective focus of cross-sector discussion: we feel there is a need to bring business, NGOs, government, techies, users and lawmakers talking together in one (virtual) place if we're to evolve a workable system.

attentiontrust.org

This is an interesting and right-headed concept, it seems to me: owning one's attention data.

Technorati Tags: attention

Logical identities and re-contextualisation

Dave Kearns pointed out to me on the Identity Gang mailing list that I was mistaken in saying that objects could exist in multiple locations online:

One of the tremendous benefits of computers, networks and the internet is that objects really do only have to exist in one place (and that's good, I'll get to why in a moment). Replicas of the object, pointers to the object, views of the object can be everywhere, but the object itself need only exist in one finite location.

This is important, because everyone who views the object (or it's replica, link, pointer, view, etc.) then gets the exact same content. Edits don't present problems because their immediately apparent in all views of the content. As important, only the owner of the content (or those designated by the owner) can modify it.

Think of it as the difference between publishing via scribes (who each create the book) compared to publishing via printing press. In the latter case you at least know that all copies look alike.

Think run-time include rather than compile time include...

You got me, Dave—point taken! Of course, there must be a authoritiative version of any given object at the data level.

However, from the user experience pov, it would seem as if an object could exist in many places.

On a related point, we are almost certainly looking at an upcoming shift in the architecture of CMSs from one-to-one relationships of server and client apps to one-to-many relationships, as per diagram below. In this sense, an object could seem to the user to "exist" in more than one client app. Each of those client apps would have its own particular presentational and interactive characteristics, yet each could display the object's representation within the same Space!

So we have consistent logical "identities" (gulp!—as in unique "things") of Content and Space on the one hand, and the possibility of re-contextualisation, of Content within various Spaces, and of Spaces within various client apps, on the other.

Technorati Tags: CMS, context, identity, IMS

Distributed conversations and Spaces

Picking up on the current focus of the current Identity Gang debate on how we might integrate and track our information (blog posts, comments, forum posts etc.) across multiple CMSs, here a few ideas I've been mulling over.

It seems to me that to solve this problem, we need to re-examine the nature of CMSs themselves, and re-invent them as IMSs—Identity Management Services. These IMSs would embody the key aspects of current CMS functionalities, but within an identity-centric conceptual framework.

One concept that's important to my IMS concept is that of a Space. I use "Space" to refer to a conceptual place where content items exist. A Space may have persistent identity, in the case of the Space of an individual (think blog) or community (think wiki or mailing list), or may have relatively transient identity, such as a Space representing all the entries in a conversation.

A content item can exist in multiple Spaces simultaneously—for instance, I might write a blog post in reply to a friend's post (I specify it as a "reply" to the original post, identified by its permalink), and copy it to the Identity Gang email list: in this case, my post exists:

1) in my blog Space—along with all the other blog content I create;

2) in the Identity mailing list Space—along with all the other Identity related posts the Identity Gang, of which I'm a member, create;

3) in a threaded conversation Space that is dynamically created (by and within my IMS) when I "replied" to the original post—along with the other person's original post, and all subsequent posts by us or others who become involved in the thread.

The beauty of this way of handling a distributed conversation is that we and others can participate in the conversation both in our individual Spaces and in the joint conversation Space simultaneously; moreover, we could choose to have additions to the conversation Space pinged to our individual Spaces and display the thread there also (or at least the items of the thread whose author permits this federation), much like the existing blog comments system.



In each case, the Space I post to respresents somewhere I have permission to express myself, whether exclusively (my blog), or as a participant in an explicit (ID mailing list) or ad-hoc (conversation with friend) community.

The identity of a Space can be understood as being shaped by two main dynamics:

1) The permissions placed upon it by its administrator(s)—which determine who can participate in it in which ways (view? edit? set permissions for others? etc.)

2) What the participants in the Space do within the permissions restrictions of (1)—how they create and interact with their own and others' content

It seems clear, then, that the metaphor of a Space is a powerful one which subsumes key identity-centric aspects of content management.

Mimicking 3D limitations

To a large extent, current CMSs like blog and wiki tools tend to assume that each piece of content belongs primarily in just one Space. So I publish a blog post—to my blog. I edit a wiki "page". I upload my photos to my account. This metaphor seems to me to be an unconscious hang-over from our experience of the physical world, where objects indeed do only occupy one location at any one time. However, as we have seen, this limitation doesn't really need to apply online.

Now some services like Flickr and, on the client, Ecto, are beginning to make it easier to pipe one piece of content into multiple Spaces. However, this concept is not yet embodied in the actual data model upon which these services are built: I have to manually re-post an item to each Space, rather than being given multiple choices of Space when I originally post, let alone being able to set up dynamic content flows between Spaces (e.g. updating my blog with new entries in a conversation Space). Finally, there is nothing like conversation Spaces in current CMS services—we have to rely on hyperlinks and thereby search services like Technorati to cobble our distributed conversations together.

Holding my horses

Of course, to develop a tech solution that embodies the Spaces concept, we have to crack all the familiar problems like authentication, ontology (currently, different services describe their information with as many different data structures ), caching, version control, privacy and security along the way! ; )

Technorati Tags: identity, ontology, IMS, CMS, space

Looking for a web developer (PHP, MySQL)

On the off-chance that one of my readers fits the bill, or knows someone who does, I'm looking for an outstanding web developer with PHP and MySQL skills to work on a new identity management software project.

Interested parties can kindly contact me via my i-name (in the sidebar), or leave a comment here.

Thanks.

Technorati Tags: PHP, MySQL

Action Network

I hadn't heard of this site until I read this morning it has won an e-democracy award, but it looks like somewhere my UK-based readers might want to check out.

Action Network can help you change something in your local area, by:

• Putting you in touch with people who feel the same way you do so together you can get something done.

• Providing you with information and advice you'll need to help you change your local area for the better.

[Cross-posted at Ideal Government Europe]