SiliconBeat

I spent Tuesday at the Internet Identity Workshop at the invitation of Kaliya Hamlin. I met Hamlin a couple of years ago while working on another conference, and had some fascinating discussions at the time about the Semantic Web and the future of news.

Hamlin was named by Fast Company last year as one of the most influential women in technology. She’s the organizer of numerous un-conferences around the valley. But in this case, she was being recognized for her co-founding and ongoing role in the Internet Identity Workshop. Started five years ago, the group gathers twice each year and was holding its 10th conference this week at the Computer  History Museum in Mountain View.

The subject of identity on the Web is especially timely right now with the controversy swirling around Facebook. The social media giant wants to essentially be the main repository of your online identity, and allow you to carry that around the Web with you. There are a lot of benefits to that, but there are also reasons to be wary. The folks at the workshop are developing more open alternatives.

What’s at stake here? As Hamlin frames it on her blog:

“The issue at hand is fundamentally about FREEDOM: the freedom to choose who hosts your identity online (with the freedom to set up and host your own), the freedom to choose your persona – how you present yourself, what your gender is, your age, your race, your sex, where you are in the world.”

So I stopped by the workshop for a few hours to sit in on some sessions and talk to Hamlin about the subject of identity on the Web. It was a great conversation, so let me summarize some of her thoughts. And at the end, I added a copy of her presentation that kicked off the three-day gathering.

Read the rest of this entry »