Next Tuesday, I will be talking to the Silicon Valley Patterns Group about LID. This is a group of mostly senior techies who meet once a week in Cupertino to discuss in-depth an emerging technical subject that interests them. Funnily enough, I have never been to their meetings because my wife has been going and I have been taking care of our 6-year old in the mean time. She won't mind me going instead next week, however, because she and I came up with LID together ...

I've been warned not to do a presentation or a speech, but to do everything interactively and with lots of code and real-world examples. Nevertheless, here is my list of subjects that we could discuss. (If you have any feedback prior, please drop me a note).

Setting the stage

• Explosion of accounts that everybody has with dozens of websites and servers
• Increase in "shared data" functionality, which requires users and groups and permissions etc.
• Spam (e.g. blog comment spam and e-mail spam)
• Phishing and other identity attacks
• Large-scale systems emerging (eg NHIN) that will necessarily be decentralized, and require pretty solid identity support

But today:

• Identity typically comes in stovepipes that are bolted into applications and sites
• Nothing out there is "internet-scale"
• Systems like Passport will never get broad acceptance

Discussion points

• Kim Cameron's Laws of Identity
• How would a digital identity technology have to look like so YOU would adopt it?
• Digital identity scenarios:
  • Single sign-on
  • Digital identities and other forms of identity (e.g. business card info)
  • Blogs: owning, posting, commenting and trackback
  • Community sites
  • Social networking
  • e-commerce and financial transactions
  • ...
• LID Whitepaper and Perl code

Code

• LID Perl script
• Work in progress

Selections of pre-meeting reading material

The broader topic

1. "What is Digital Identity?". Editor's corner, Digital Identity World. A somewhat Liberty-centric but useful introduction.
2. "The Laws of Identity". From Microsoft's chief identity architect.He proves convincingly why Passport.com was destined to fail. [no irony here]
3. The Identity Project. An assessment of the UK Identity Cards Bill & its implications". London School of Economics. A timely political debate about digital identities and what works and what doesn't (quite damning)

The technologies:

1. Microsoft Passport: the grand-daddy, but on its way out, so we don't need to read about it
2. Project Liberty specifications.
3. Typekey: MovableType's Passport-like authentication system to combat blog spam.
4. Identity Commons Overview.
5. SXIP Networks: "How SXIP works".
6. LID Whitepaper.
7. Microsoft InfoCard. Other than what went through the press this week (Search Google for "Info-Card" — yep, that spelling), information is unfortunately only available under NDA.

Specifically on LID

1. Quotes about LID from all over the Web.
2. LID Whitepaper.
3. Example LID implementation (Perl). Includes LID Demo User, LID Single-Sign-On site.
4. A new LID open-source implementation (J2EE) called Xanthus.