Digital ID Coach

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future, records, tools CRM, Data privacy, identity management, Jason Cavnar, marketing, Mary Hodder, Monetization, Shane Green, Technology/Internet, Todd Cullen

Stateless Distributed Membership

May 26th, 2010

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At this past IIW, I convened a session to ask if and how it might be possible to do a stateless distributed membership for a website. There are two main ideas behind this proposal. First, I don’t really NEED to have a membership database of my own. That is, I don’t need to have another place for you to create an account, user ID and password. We can use OpenID, Information Cards, or other technologies for authenticating and authorizing you. Second, if I want to move toward a world where you control your own data, I don’t need to maintain the database of your comments. I only need to know where your comments are stored so I can properly assemble things as needed. It’s convenient but not technically necessary to own and control all the bits myself.

My proposal for a Stateless Distributed Membership is a mouthful, so I’ll unpack it a bit. There are three parts: a membership, being stateless, and being distributed.

Membership

Let me start with the easy part. You probably understand the idea of membership as a group or association of people contributing to something like a conversation or project. They’re members of a group, or in my case, members of a conversation or project on my site. Nothing unusual about this idea.

Being Stateless

Next is the idea of being stateless. In computer science, the http protocol that you use to call a web page and associated resources is stateless because you call a page from the URL or a link in your browser, the server responds by sending the page, graphics, or whatever, then you see it. Each request is separate; there’s no need to stay connected to the servers. In my case, being “stateless” means that each transaction is independent. Eve Maler talks about a stateless identity in her post Both a data borrower and a data lender be:

This is a kind of data statelessness, in that when you tell various sites they can set, read, and republish your [information from your Personal Data Store], they’re letting go of any pretense of exclusive hosting control so that they can offer you a different kind of value.

Now, in the IdM and VRM worlds, some of us have been talking about identity statelessness for a while, which is similar but looks more like straight data-sharing (reading) rather than arbitrary service access (setting).

For some reason this is a tougher sell — even though CRM systems and user accounts are shot through with pale copies of stale data (and, in the enterprise case, even though syncing directories and replicating databases is brittle and no fun).

Even when one party — say, you yourself — is authoritative for some piece of personal data (like your home address), all the sites insist on making you provision a copy of this data into their profile pages by hand and by value, and insist on thinking they own something truly valuable even after you move and forget to tell them.

The bottom line: if I don’t insist on “owning” your data, we both will realize more value from our trust and flexibility. It’s daring, and in the larger scheme of things, I believe it’s a Good Thing.

Distributed

Finally, the term distributed refers to the fact that all parts of the conversation or projects are stored elsewhere on the net. If you wish to add a comment to a conversation on my server, your comment is added to your personal datastore (wherever it is, and whatever form it might take). When you wish to read the conversation, my server compiles the contributions as needed.

In this model, I do need to maintain a database of where to find your comments and a way to authorize you as the person who granted permission for me to include them in the conversation on my website. But think of it: if you want to revoke permission for me to use your comments, you can. How revolutionary (and potentially messy) is that?

Furthermore, you may choose to log in using an identity that’s different from the last one you used. That works on my server. For example, you might wish to be a regular person contributing to most conversations, but if you’re a professional fundraiser and one of the threads is about raising funds for a non-profit, you may wish to disclose your work and position in that context. Your two identities describe different parts of your life, and you may have good reasons to keep those parts separate.

The IIW Session

In my session, I described this concept and asked what people thought about it. I offered three scenarios where people might interact. One of them: a conversation or forum where blog posts and trackbacks can help create a threaded conversation. The session is an hour-long exploration and discovery of the possibilities. If you have questions or can add a piece to this puzzle, I’d love to hear from you.

My heartfelt thanks go to the people with whom I’ve spoken about this, including =JeffH, Eve, the guy at the end of the video talking with me about trackbacks (I’m sorry I can’t find your name), several others who made great suggestions and shared ideas at my session, and Joe, who spent considerable time exploring underlying frameworks with me.

Coaching moment: You probably have more than one account online, and have likely cursed the problem of forgetting user names and passwords. You may have wished that the picture of you holding a beer wasn’t online for your boss to see. Maybe you’ve been spooked by an advertisement for something that you really didn’t want. If you could do things differently, what would you do? How do you handle your accounts now? Do you feel secure about your online practices? Do you even want to be in control? Not everyone does.

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Portable Identities

April 27th, 2009

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There’s a good chance that you’ve signed up for several online accounts, and now you have several different online identities (user names, passwords, and search and purchasing histories). If you use social media tools like LinkedIn or Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter (there are so many more!), you probably spend time socializing and sharing information online every day. One person, many identities. That can be a problem.

Jeremiah Owyang’s post (about a Forrester report) Future of the Social Web, in Five Eras states that:

Today’s social experience is disjointed because consumers have separate identities in each social network they visit. A simple set of technologies that enable a portable identity will soon empower consumers to bring their identities with them — transforming marketing, eCommerce, CRM, and advertising. IDs are just the beginning of this transformation, in which the Web will evolve step by step from separate social sites into a shared social experience. Consumers will rely on their peers as they make online decisions, whether or not brands choose to participate. Socially connected consumers will strengthen communities and shift power away from brands and CRM systems; eventually this will result in empowered communities defining the next generation of products.

I’m particularly interested in one of Owyang’s Five Eras of the Social Web:

4) Era of Social Context: Personalized and accurate content

There is a lot of work being done in this area, giving the power to centrally control and keep accurate information about ourselves. One name for it is “user-driven services.” I’ll be writing more on this very empowering concept in posts to come.

Coaching moment: if you were to collect all of your information in one place then selectively share some of it with various online services, what would that look like? Think about all of the data (searches, emails, tweets, posts, etc.) that you’ve generated this week. Which ones are you happy to share with the public forever? If not everything, what would you protect, for how long, and why?

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Working toward Personalized Commerce

December 13th, 2008

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The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada made this outstanding video called Privacy and Social Networks. It’s important to understand, as this video shows, that this harvesting of personal data is going on all the time.

Coaching moment: There are two sides to this problem. On one side are the account holders of these social networking sites. They are busy disclosing their interests, connections, and lives. These account holders may not realize that they are being mapped and sold out to the extent that they are. Perhaps they think it’s ok.

On the other side are the businesses that run these sites. They have Terms of Service (TOS) contracts that account holders agree to, whether they read the terms or not. The businesses engage in harvesting and selling practices that benefit their bottom line. (Would you expect anything less? They are businesses, and this is one way that it’s done.) The problem is that the buying and selling of account holder data is not transparent to the account holders.

If this makes you feel uneasy (and I think it should), think about how you’d change this model. An underlying assumption of the whole user data exchange is that companies want to sell you their stuff. The harvesting and data collection is about making sure you’re more likely to be interested in what they want to sell you. Marketers don’t like guessing, and they often get it wrong. (When you don’t buy, it’s a wasted catalog).

But what would it look like if you had a platform for requesting marketing material for something you’re interested in buying, instead of getting angry that you have so much spam and bulk mail (catalogs and the like)?

This is a much longer post about some work being done in this area. Read more…

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