Robin Wilton's esoterica

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13 Sep · Tue 2005

Identity Day at Salford University

I was up at Salford University yesterday for an Identity Management seminar hosted by their Information Services Division (ISD). The day started with a little excitement, as one of my co-presenters was fog-bound at Heathrow airport... so at very short notice the audience got a double dose of me instead. Ah well... into every life some rain must fall, and yesterday it was their turn ;^) That said, I must thank the ISD folks, especially Tony Lewis, Martine Carassik and Tom Gordon, for doing a great job of hosting us and putting on an event which I think all the attendees found useful. There was a good level of open discussion, which is always heartening. There were two things about ISD which left a particular impression: the first was the thoughtfulness which had gone into their project strategy for the Identity Management (IDM) initiative. All the signs were that they have done a great job of aligning the IDM project with the enterprise-level objectives of the University as a whole. That's something it's easy to spout as a mantra, but let's be honest... it's a recommendation more often flouted than followed. As a result, they share (with their board and finance people) a clear view of what benefits the project is expected to deliver over what period, and that gives them a lot of positive buy-in from their decision-makers. The second was the similarly thoughtful approach Tom Gordon brings to the principles of identity management as well as the practice. You can read some of Tom's thoughts here. It's well worth a look, because I think he articulates some principles which are only going to grow in relevance. Tom also pointed me at Stephen Downes' blog, particularly this piece on identity, which has just soaked up a good chunk of my morning (so thanks, Tom ;^). One last 'footnote' to the trip; as I was driving out of central Manchester I quite unexpectedly passed Strangeways prison (unexpectedly for me, that is... I didn't know it was there). It's surprisingly close to the city centre, and is quite large and grim. For those who like to make connections of this kind: Strangeways was designed as a set of radial 'spokes' spreading from a central round tower. The name given to this design at the time was "panoptical" (i.e. where all is visible) - Stefan Brands and others currently use that term to describe identity systems in which too much data about the individual is exposed whether they consent to it or not.

Posted by racingsnake @ 11:02 AM GMT+00:00 [ Comments [2] ]

Comments:

[Trackback] The panopticon was designed to produce certain effects - certain changes in behaviour in the actors. In my view, this is what is most important in deciding whether to regard something as a metaphorical implementation of the panopticon. I haven't seen a...

Posted by POSIWID on September 21, 2005 at 10:30 PM GMT+00:00 #

Richard, thanks for that. OK, here's an attempt to address the missing part of the debate which you identify... First, I think Pat's position was that the Liberty architects certainly didn't set out to achieve a panoptical design. that is, they saw no benefit in a design which encouraged any of the actors to behave as if all the actions of one set of actors were plainly visible to the others. Indeed, they made it clear from the outset that user consent to the visibility of data was of critical importance. Second, does a Liberty design result in an unintentionally panoptical outcome? I don't think so - a proper focus on privacy is the best counter to panopticalism (if that's a word!). Liberty continues to devote time and effort to work on questions of privacy, consent and ID theft, and I think over time those will tend to become defining characteristics of Liberty-compliant implementations, especially when viewed from the user perspective.

Posted by Robin Wilton on October 10, 2005 at 02:55 PM GMT+00:00 #

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