Identity Society paper and wiki launch

John Madelin and I recently wrote a paper called "Towards the Identity Society". Now, with the kind help of Jean-Louis Seguineau, we have launched a wiki version of the same at www.identitysociety.org, in the hope of contributing towards the establishment a broad context for the discussion of identity—one that encompasses not only technological, but also psychological, business, legal, social and governmental perspectives on the topic.

Phil Becker was kind enough to read the paper through, and asked the following questions of us about it subsequently. I have reproduced our reply below to Phil to provide a fuller picture of our aims with the paper.

While our original paper is one important starting point for the wiki, we recognise that, to succeed in its mission, the wiki must transcend our necessarily limited perspectives to embody the collective wisdom of stakeholders from across society. To that end, I warmly welcome my readers to input your insights and expertise, in the hope that we can, together, create a valuable intellectual resource for society as a whole.

Phil's questions and our answers:

[What was] your desired mission with this paper?

Our mission was to work through certain ideas about "identity" on the broadest possible conceptual canvas, and to find ways of communicating those ideas in as simple and direct a way possible without compromising the depth or precision of our treatment of each constituent subject area (technology, business, government, community etc.).

That said, it was more a case of the paper writing us than us writing the paper! John and I found we shared many ideas, differed on some others, but had a common conviction that there is a truth that we could work towards (through much discussion and experimentation). Of course, that process is ongoing, and the paper represents just one step along a path. You could say that our deeper mission, then, is to stimulate the already-vibrant "identity" conversation to new levels of integration and breadth.

Who are you targeting (technical/nontechnical, general/academic/political audience, etc.) and what you want them to take away from it?

The paper is a strange beast in that respect: we would anticipate that only a handful of people would easily encompass the entire breadth of the paper without a certain amount of link-clicking or other research.

However, our hope is that very many people will be able to take something from the paper (Aldo suggested we might provide a "route map" through the paper for different readerships), and, more importantly, that once we open the paper up for community editing (imminently) that subject specialists can dive into to the relevant section and improve it in its own right. Small pieces loosely joined, you might say.

As for what we hope people will take away from the paper, I would suggest the following:

Identity cannot be pinned down to neat and objective definitions, but rather is an emergent property of people's perceptions, within relationship with others, of themselves and the world around them. This observation has significant ramifications not only for our approach to evolving technological and legal frameworks for government, business and civic society, but also for the ways in which we may empower the individual human across the diverse contexts of their life: the Identity Society must enshrine an honour and respect for each individual's identity.

In order to meet the challenge of building the Identity Society, and the Identity Web that will facilitate it, it seems likely that we will have to re-evaluate our technological and legal frameworks at a deep level, rather than just attempting to extend legacy architectural approaches. However, given the vast resources that have been invested by business and government in these legacy approaches, we recognise that there is bound to be a great deal of resistance to such radical architectural re-evaluation, and that significant change is likely to occur—as it has with the coming of each new Age of mankind—through disruptive breakthroughs, rather than in a smoothly linear fashion. We hope that the paper will stimulate people to think those breakthrough thoughts!

What do you hope your work on producing this paper will accomplish?

As I mentioned above, we hope primarily to stimulate the conversation, in particular between technologists and stakeholders from each other community (business, government, law, civic society). The "value spectrum" metaphor is conceived as a bridge between tech/law and other sectors, as well as between tech/law and the individual, of course.

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