Last week I attended a Mashup Event in London on The Value of Your Digital Identity.  There is plenty of write up available online with this piece from Jude Umeh from the BCS being amongst the most rich.

In Jude’s post he restates a question raised during the panel session by Ben Hoyle, a European Patent Attorney;

“What about those lacking an identity? There are many still without bank accounts or fixed addresses”

It’s an interesting question simply because it highlights what I believe to be a common misunderstanding of identity; that identity is something we have, create or obtain.

I don’t want to get into the philosophy behind identity or indeed into the technicalities – those are well discussed by people far more knowledgeable than myself but a simple viewpoint here may be helpful to most.

Identity is generally accepted to be “an aggregate of all those views, opinions, thoughts etc about the self from third parties.”

Confused?  Okay think of this;  One’s name is not one’s identity.  I have many names none of which I have given myself.  My parent’s called me Barnaby, my friends Barney, my kids Dad and any number of other less repeatable names by various people over the years.  The point here is these are identifiers for me.  More importantly they are identifiers for me in particular situations or contexts from other people’s perspectives.

In marketing speak these are persona, they are the various roles I play in life.

My identity is all of these mashed up together.  It’s just that a third party may only ever see me in one role, or persona and so to them that is my apparent identity.

Just to make this a tad more confusing, strictly these identifiers (names) are for the relationship (role) that I play with others.  Whenever I interact with someone (or indeed something else – say a business) a relationship is created and intrinsically so is an identifier.  For example when I first shop with a business I play the role of customer to which I am assigned a customer number as an identifier – the weird thing is I as the customer may never even be aware of that identifier as it may be nothing more than “he was the one hundred and thirtieth customer in store number 6 on that date.”

Okay so identity is everything you do, created about you by others for the purposes of defining a relationship of some sort.

So back to the question of “What about those lacking an identity? There are many still without bank accounts or fixed addresses”

Given the above view on identity I would posture that there are a very very very small number of individuals in the modernised world who have NO identity.  Strictly speaking everyone the second they are born (not going to argue the whole conceived thing here) has identity as they have a direct relationship not only with their mother but also with whomsoever played midwife / OBGYN.

We get given a name, our birth is registered, we enrol in school, start work and get a National Insurance Number in the UK (think SSN in US).  Every time we interact with another person, agency or business yet another identifier is created.

So in a modern society we are never really without identity.  With regards to the question posed by Ben the problem isn’t a lack of identity but more a distinct absence of transferable identity.

Curiously this is a problem well understood by large web properties and in particular social networks.  I may have an account on say Facebook with a huge wealth of Barney invested but when I want a new Twitter account I  am in effect an “identity less” new user with little baggage or ability to transfer my self from one service to another.

The web space has been pondering this for years.  OpenID was and is (post it’s blog spam prevention conception) touted as a solution for porting and identifying one’s self from site to site.  Today OAuth, Google FriendConnect  and FBConnect offer a glimpse of what identity portability may provide in the future.

Back on topic though.  If I wanted a bank account I would be asked for identification to which I could produce any number of pieces of information; from drivers license to passport to a fingerprint of my social graph – a map of all my personal relationships. The fact is any identity identifying details could and should suffice (bank regulation accepting).

So because a person doesn’t have a bank account or a fixed permanent address does not render someone identity less at all.  It’s just that current structures for identifying an individual are tied to far too strict a set of minimal options.

As a byword; in New Zealand the driver’s license is ONLY acceptable in law as proof of entitlement to drive on public roads.  It is NOT a piece of identification that can be legally relied upon for any other purpose.  Yet I have clear recollection of opening a new bank account with KiwiBank – a state owned and run bank, where it was THE ONLY form of identification they would accept.

The is one situation though where people do appear to be identity less – the refugee, and more particularly the stateless individual.  In a series of conversations and arguments with Vinay Gupta during early 2009 he was able to convince me of situations in his experience in Africa where people without papers or any physical form of identification were held in refugee camps after crossing borders.  To the hosting country they were in effect identity less.  No one was willing to even go so far as to assign a case number or start asylum  proceedings.  They were no one in the eyes of others.

Since being back in London I’ve been lucky enough to meet many interesting people sharing similar ideologies.  From the wonderfully enthusiastic Jonathan MacDonald and his “Every Single One of Us” movement to the truly inspiring millitant in Adriana Lukas and “her” Mine project.   All these projects, startups and thinking pretty well follow up on where Cluetrain left off, each takes a slightly different direction or stance.

Thus far though, for all their efforts I have yet to see any single project offer up good solid advise on why business should adopt the thinking of placing the consumer in charge let alone pragmatic guidance on practical use cases for identity, semantics and generally doing things in this way.

I can’t even remember how I stumbled upon “Pull” now earlier in the week.   Twitter most likely but I could see instantly that the author (David Seigel) and his team at The Power of Pull had obviously been paying attention to all the work put in over the years by a great many technologists, marketeers, anthropologists et al.

I’m not even going to try to describe the book, rather I will paste verbatim their own description below;  BUT for those that have heard me talk on identity, privacy, trust, semantics, data – in fact ANYTHING over the last ten years then you simply must go and buy this book, read, remember, acknowledge and move your business forward.

Anyway here is David’s own blurb…

How the pull paradigm and the semantic web combine to help businesses face the challenges of the future.

The Problem

On the Web today, we see millions of web sites, each of which presents web pages and documents. These are simply electronic versions of the old paper-based ways of doing things: writing checks, filing taxes, looking at menus, catalog pages, magazines, etc. When you search for something on Google, you get a list of web sites that may or may not have what you’re looking for, based on keywords found in the text. You have to look at each one and decide whether it answers your question. Google doesn’t know where the information or answers are; it just knows which pages have which keywords and who links to them.

Our information infrastructure isn’t scaling up very well at all. The average person now sees over 1,000,000 words and consumes 34 gigabytes of information every day. Mike Bergman estimates white-collar workers spend 25% of their time looking for the documents and information they need to do their work. One billion people are online now, and 4 billion have mobile phones. Exhaustion of IPv4 addresses (limit is 4 billion) is predicted for sometime in 2011. By 2030, there will be a minimum of 50 billion devices connected via internet and phone networks. Our information infrastructure is built to haul electronic versions of 19^th century documents for humans to read, and it’s keeping us from using information effectively.

The solution to our information problem is the semantic web and the pull paradigm.

The Semantic Web

The semantic web is nothing less than an overhaul of our information infrastructure, according to these basic principles:

• Electronic information will become unambiguous. Another word for semantic is unambiguous. In the Semantic Web, we declare what we mean in precise, standardized terms. Data that is semantic means exactly the same thing to any system or person who uses it.
• Data will become findable. Already we are seeing the emergence of the Open Web, where information lives online and can be found easily. There will be central repositories and central hubs that link information together. This is called “linked data in the cloud” and is the next trans-formation after services and software go online (see linkeddata.org). Humans now use 1% of all electricity to power data centers. The percentage will quadruple in ten years.
• Data will be reusable. We’ll keep all our data online in semantic formats and use it over and over by pointing to it. Data will become like Lego building blocks of information that can be combined and recombined to suit each particular task.
• Data will be interoperable. We won’t have to translate from one system to another. As an example, Edgar.gov will soon become a cloud-based hub for XBRL data from companies reporting results. Since everyone uses the same standards, all the software will be able to tie into the original sources of data and use it in the way that’s most meaningful to the subscriber.
• Devices will be ubiquitous. There won’t be any more computers as we know them. Apple OS and Windows as well as Google Android, iPhone, Blackberry, TVs, and book readers will all be replaced by Net-based screens of all sizes that simply see the web and do everything online. The market for netbooks is currently growing at 40% per quarter vs notebooks’ 20%. Prices will drop through the floor. Screens will be on your wrist, on your car dashboard, or on your wall, and they will connect to the net, where everything will take place.
• Systems will be flexible. We’ll start using flexible knowledge models and declarative systems that use data, rather than encoded processes, to drive business systems. Today’s procedure-driven software has already broken (most enterprises spend 80% of their IT budgets on maintenance). Tomorrow’s flexible systems will be adaptive – they will respond in real-time to business events and change themselves daily as the business environment changes.
• Real time. The semantic web lets us close the gap between what happens in the real world and when we know it. When the processes and products themselves generate the data, we will go to a real-time economy that will be much more efficient than our time-lagged way of doing things today.

The Pull Paradigm

We are making the transition from pushing information to pulling it, and that will change everything. Originally, the TV networks sent out signals for shows according to a schedule that benefitted their advertisers. Then, VCRs let consumers watch when they wanted and skip the ads. Now on-demand services let consumers watch a handful of TV shows whenever they like. The future is online, where you can find and watch any video ever recorded any time you like on any device.

• This will happen in all industries. People will pull information to them whenever, wherever, however they like. People will use online data lockers to store and guard their information, and that will replace today’s computers. It will power everything. We’ll store all our preferences there, so rather than managing music we’ll manage our preferences. This will allow us to (finally) use software agents to look for things on our behalf.
• Many processes will invert, in favor of the customer. No longer will we “push” things through the supply chain. Instead, customers will “pull” items through. Consumers will pull services on demand. Marketing will change from outbound messaging to responding to queries. We won’t search for things; we’ll say what we are looking for and let things find us instead. Software will cost 10% of what it costs today and will be much cheaper to maintain. Everyone will be both a producer and consumer of information that becomes part of the ecosystem.
• Account portability will be a leading indicator. When people can port their accounts from one vendor to another, the power in the relationship will flip. An early project is called Vendor Relationship Management, which will get the whole process rolling, in the same way that the video recorder did for television. Imagine if you could port your entire checking account or brokerage account to another bank and have the new bank understand everything – that’s the semantic web. It promises to cut the cost of health care by 25%, and that’s just the beginning.
• The result is the performance economy, where companies can’t afford to be on the other side of the table from customers. In the performance economy, you gain only when your customers do. Many industries will be flattened. It’s just getting started, but this model will come to dominate in the 21^st century.

See? Like I said – go buy this book.

Update: There is a podcast interview with David Seigel over on the excellen IT Conversations website with the good Mr Windley and for those wanting a quick 62 minute intro it’s a great place to start.

Okay so after a few days of various bashings by the press, bloggers and assorted “informed” people Facebook have rolled back their T&C’s to the point of not seemingly claiming ownership over users data for ever and a day.

Whilst a great deal of noise was made about the whole issue it is interesting that very few commented on the probable thinking behind the change despite a post from Mark Zuckerberg doing a fairly decent job of trying to allay fears.

From what I have read the change to the FB T&C’s was in order to try to retain some of the integrity inherent in the relationship formed by creating data rather than claiming “all shiny things as theirs.”

Let me use a simile to try to explain…

If I shop at an online supermarket they necessarily collect data about me as well as the purchase in order to fulfil my order; meta-data about the relationship formed by the purchase.  It is jointly owned for the purposes of maintaining the relationship.

VRM/ESOOU thinking dictates (please do correct me if I am off track) that actually the information is solely the property of the user and therefore under my control.  However if I unilaterally remove all the information within my ownership (even the jointly owned content) then the relationship falls apart – you can’t have a single node relationship.

BUT my purchase, or more specifically the data surrounding what I bought, when and price is NOT my sole property.  They are  stock related information owned by the store vital to it’s operation – what is mine are the personal details identifying the purchaser as me.

So what I am trying to get to is that ownership of data isn’t as straight forward as “it’s mine” and more often than not it is “part is mine, part is yours and another bit is ours.”

Now from what I understand FB were trying to achieve a point where once information was placed into the system (the relationship was created – normally between two users) that if the originating owner wanted out of the relationship the T&C’s gave FB (and therefore the second party) a degree of integrity for that relationship.  In other words, whilst the relationship could be anonymised it could not be completely removed.

To my thinking this isn’t a bad place to be, the problem was that FB took a rather parental approach to the issue dictating through the T&C’s that they would in effect own the data taking the issue away from the user.

So in this case community pressure has “won” their cause having the terms revert to the old script but I can’t help but think there was indeed nothing malevolent about the move in the first place, just maybe poorly worded and poorly sold to the user base – so nothing new for Mr Z there then.

What I took away from the conversation was just how valuable conversation can be, an idle chat which allowed Tony to probe my inner mental workings and I to exercise thoughts and feelings. A conversation recently sadly lacking from my life (and no disrespect to my super intelligent wife or parents) having recently moved back to the UK.

It reminded of Chris Locke’s essay in The Cluetrain Manifesto when he talked about his role as a PR guy for an AI company back in the early 90′s.

“I started having genuine conversations with genuinely interesting people. I’d call up… no agenda, no objective – and we’d talk.”

“These conversations weren’t work. They were interesting and engaging. They were exciting. They were fun. I couldn’t wait to get back to work…”

Locke found this approach to be far more productive generating, in his case, far more positive attention for his employer.

So back to me then – after all this is my space for socialising thoughts and as a reader you can always change the channel.

I like to think of Social Media as a shelf full of toys for facilitating conversation, I am by no means a Social Media expert but my dialogue with Tony help me revisit long since filed away thoughts on the underlying purposefulness of Social Media. More to the point; is there a singular reason behind why conversational approaches work so well?

Is is because of some deep human desire for inclusion into a thought or decision making process, or a narcissistic want to espouse one’s own knowledge (which certainly drives me for sure)? Well probably both of those and a pile of other rationale, but I suspect that underpinning the lot is trust. Or more correctly a notion of trust.

You see Trust is really just a personal perception of how much faith we place in another entity based upon a set of very personal criteria. Each of us will have very different notions of how much faith we place in certain brands, people, thoughts etc based upon things that matter to us personally.

Conversation in a professional context helps to build a relationship, one in which each party not only understands the content of the conversation but the position from which the other party comes from. Trust dictates the weight of that conversation within it’s context.

So in the case of my ramblings with Tony, he as an educationalist (well ex) was interested in the thinking behind some of my thinking on the whole social space, he was looking as the sociological side of my thought processes. For him, I suspect (read hope) his interest was piqued by some eloquent elaboration on why this is that, and that is this. From Tony’s perspective I appeared to know what I was talking about and therefore he was able to make a personal assessment of how much trust he should place in my thinking.

I on the other hand wanted, no needed, Tony’s attention and at some level validation of my thoughts. I wanted his trust. Why? Because as an ex-educationalist, as a fellow Tuttle Club attendee, as an interesting and inciteful thinking I trusted Tony’s opinion. It mattered to me as in my judgement Tony was qualified to pass judgement.

And this surely holds true for conversations in all sectors; brand to consumer (yuk word but hey), business to business, even government to electorate. I mean just look at the unprecidented use of social media by the US Democratic campaign to engender trust in the Obama/Biden ticket. Would people really have voted for Obama if they hadn’t trusted that he was the best option for the role? I certainly hope not.

So I am going to have to explore this area again, more, a lot more as to my mind everything revolves around trust.