Robin Wilton's esoterica

I know adversarial debate is a consequence of our parliamentary system, and that's a good thing. Critical and open examination of the government's plans and achievements is good.

Unfortunately, the process of parliamentary debate can become such a stylised charade that sometimes it's hard to see what benefit it delivers to the electorate; arguably, Prime Minister's Questions (PMQ) falls into that trap.

Here's an example from about half an hour ago, as reported on the BBC's 'point by point' page:

"The Tory leader went on to call for reform of the Home Office including the creation of a single border force. Mr Blair said Mr Cameron was not serious about finding out who was in Britain because he did not support ID cards."

There are so many questionable assumptions built into that reply that it's hard to know where to begin.

For instance: it's illegal to require non-UK EU nationals to carry the identity card of another EU state. Therefore a UK Identity card cannot tell you how many EU citizens are legally in the UK.

It can't tell you how many other foreign nationals are in the UK, legally or otherwise.

It can't tell you how many UK Identity card holders are currently in the country (as opposed to in Dortmund, or Florida, or Kabul).

It can't tell you how many UK Identity card holders also hold a valid or forged passport from another country.

A single border force might or might not be the solution - I don't know - but if it is, it could not possibly be fit for purpose if it had only UK Identity cards as the basis for its work.

There are things which a UK Identity card could do for the cardholder and for the government, but it's hard to see how those can ever reach the public consciousness as long as the debate is conducted at this level.

I'm delighted to see Eve getting involved in the 'user-centricity' discussion, and that the as-yet-blogless Conor Cahill is contributing via Eve's thread. He's so reticent. ;^)

They also refer to Pete Rowley's useful comments on the subject. Here's what I think is one of the gems in Pete's post:

"[It] isn’t hard to architect identity systems to include freedom and choice, but it might not be what one would create if the issue were never considered."

And Paul Madsen has encapsulated a lot of the disparate ideas in a nice, coherent diagram, here. Turns out that identity systems are a lot like ogres. I mean onions. Or parfait. Everybody likes parfait.

It's great that the taxonomy is getting such high-wattage attention; that should definitely continue, and my bet is that it will produce really useful output.

And now for something a little more discursive.

One of Conor's comments about the sometimes-unwanted 'topological' implications of the term 'user centric' made me think back to analytical theories such as 'structuralism', 'deconstructivism' and so on.

In the terms of someone like Derrida or Foucault, one might see identity as a narrative. That idea fits with a lot of what has been said already: for instance, Peter Dare's comment that 'credentials' are simply encapsulations of specific (and hopefully verifiable) events from the (narrative) 'life arc' of an individual. It also accords with the idea that assertions of identity are always at least two-party 'conversations' - and that the owner of the identity is not necessarily a party in that conversation.

It's a characteristic of narratives that they are often outside the control of the subject. In identity as in other things, people talk about you when you're not there. And that, in turn, brings in the themes of reputation and trust.

What this suggests to me is this: that in our discussions of 'user centricity', 'user control', 'user consent', we are focussing on functions rather than goals. That's fine, but it might also be useful to take a step back and ask why we're interested in user c* in the first place.

And here's where Pet Rowley's comment (above) is seminal: 'freedom' and 'choice' are desirable design goals because - like user c* - they generate and enhance the user's trust in the system... in what is done with the user's identity. When people talk about you behind your back, you have to trust that they're saying nice things. If there's a difference between what they say then and what they say to your face, it undermines your trust in them. If what they say about you is unfavourable, it undermines other people's trust in you...

So what we are looking for may actually be 'narrative identity' or 'user-trusted identity'; user c* may simply be some of the desirable attributes of such a design.

Following on from a lively discussion on Monday evening, this one's for James Governor. We were talking about (among many other things) Rear Admiral Harry Harris' extraordinary reference to the Guantanamo suicides as an act of asymmetric warfare.

"No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country"
General George Patton

He must be spinning in his grave.

Incidentally, if you haven't seen it, for pure cinematic theatre, the opening sequence of "Patton", which is where I first heard this quotation, is well worth watching. For all that it's a 'war movie', the film itself is a fascinating study of Patton's character. The impression one's left with (and I forget who said this) is that "given that he's out, you wouldn't necessarily put him in an asylum... but if he was in, I doubt you'd let him out".