Towards the end of 2019, I was invited to deliver a keynote at the OpenID Foundation Summit in Japan. At a very personal level, the January 2020 Summit was an opportunity to spend time with dear friends from around the world. It would be the last time I saw Kim Cameron in person. It would include a dinner with the late Vittorio Bertocci. And it was my last “big” trip before the COVID lock down.
At the Summit, I was asked to talk about the “Future of Identity.” It was a bit of a daunting topic since I am no real futurist and haven’t been an industry analyst for a long time. So I set about writing what I thought the next 10 years would look like from the view of a practitioner. You can read what I wrote as well as see a version of me presenting this.
A concept I put forward in that talk was one of “counselors”: software agents that act on one’s behalf to make introductions of the individual to a service and vice versa, perform recognition of these services and associated credentials, and prevent or at least inhibit risky behavior, such as dodgy data sharing. I provide an overview of these concepts in my Future of Identity talk at approximately minute 20.
Why even talk about counselors
That’s a reasonable question. I have noticed that there is a tendency in the digital identity space (and I am sure in others too) to marvel at problems. Too many pages spent talking about how something is a fantastically hard problem to solve and why we must do so… with scant pages of follow up on how we do so. Additionally, there’s another tendency to marvel at very technical products and services that “solve the problem.” Except they don’t. They solve a part of the problem or they are one of many tools needed to solve the problem. The challenges of digital identity management are legion and they manifest themselves in different ways to different industry sectors in different geographies. One can argue that while we have used magnificent tools to solve account management problems, we really haven’t begun to solve identity management ones. Counselors are a way to both humanize online interactions and make meaningful (as in meaningful and valuable to the individual) progress on solving the challenges of digital identity management.
Continue reading Counselors in the Modern Era