Identity Society launched!

Identity Society's Open Space launch event yesterday, held in the BT Tower, was a great success by all accounts. My heartfelt thanks go to co-organisers Mark Lizar, Richard Baker, Iain Henderson and John Madelin and to facilitators Kaliya Hamlin and Charla Givans for their sterling efforts.

Everyone I talked with during and after the event seemed to feel that Identity Society could serve a crucial role in orchestrating a broad spectrum of conversations and projects about the relevance of identity to society. At the moment, discussion and action around identity tends to be fragmented across industry and academic specialisms (technology, business, government, psychology, sociology etc.). This leads to a great deal of confusion, as real human needs tend to disregard such neat categories. Identity Society clearly has a big gap to fill!

Discussions in the Open Space were lively and productive, the topics ranging from the challengingly broad "What is identity?" to more specific ones such as "Key identity topics for the next five years", "How can we foster the Identity Society conversation?" and "Costings of the national ID Card". Notes on the discussions should be appearing on the wiki over the next few days (we had limited wifi access on the day). Kaliya, ably assisted by Charla, provided skillful and insightful facilitation for the Open Space. Between them, they kept the whole experience fun and quick-paced.

The closing session threw up quite a few ideas and observations that I won't attempt to report in full here. One clear theme emerged, however: the group's vision for Identity Society is as an open space dedicated to fostering insights into the relevance of identity to society, within which specific working groups—with practical and tangible agendas for improving specific aspects of that society—can flourish and cross-pollinate.

For newcomers to Identity Society, if you would like to get involved in bringing the vision into reality, please let me know, and I'll send you an invitation to the mailing list. You can also simply tag relevant blog posts and delicious bookmarks "idsoc" and they'll show up in the aggregator on the identitysociety.org wiki.

Yesterday's launch event was just the beginning for Identity Society; but it was a good beginning.