Federating the Next Generation: Day 2 Closing Keynote
Posted 3 months, 2 weeks ago at 1:06 pm. 0 comments
Nate Klingenstein from Internet2 is going to bring us to a close with a ‘cynical’ keynote.
Today…
The anecdote of the Cardiff Giant .. fakes can be popular and travel faster than the truth. Fake identities and identity theft is a growing problem.
The Consumer Factor
Why have consumer organisations jumped into federated identity … because it is lucrative. Double click and personalised advertising is still most of Google’s income. Second generation is email companies like Gmail and hotmail and now Facebbok and Twitter are becoming the largest repositories of personal information and have been very successful at monetising this. They have also done a great job of raising user expectations that everything should be free and easy and powered by ads.
Universities and Identities
Universities house both applications and identities and are the natural home for much user data. We may outsource the systems that run these but we are not going to outsource the business capability – it is too core. We also host a number of applications but increasingly not all of them will be locally hosted.
The Important Players in Academic Identity
- Government
- Faculty
- Applications
- Users
“These groups will collectively shape identity in learning over the next 10 years”.
Nate is now unpicking the different perspectives and goals these groups might have.
Governments want strong data protection, assertion and protection of digital identity.
Faculty want good learning resources by the easiest possible route, but they also want undivided attention – do they want social networking in the classroom? Tension between both stronger IPR and freely circulated intellectual property. Functional IPR is essential to the cretaion of knowledge – probably not in current form though. The incentives for creating knowledge are less than previously.
Commercial applications want a user base to make money from, licensing fees and advertising is a nice plus. Other applications aren’t really sure what they want but would be happy to be helped with the username/password problem. They talk vaguely about security and usability. However Identity Services are critical – indeed, foundational – for “cloud computing”. Whatever the cloud is one thing your organisation needs to do is have good identity management and federating of that identity.
Users want CONSISTENCY. There is agreement that users want consistency, but huge disagreement as to what that consistency should be. There more screaming there is hopefully the faster this will get resolved. Users get confused. They like buttons. They do get the concept of work and personal personas and are able to switch between them – they may not want these to be converged. Privacy and security are very important to users – particularly in countries where privacy laws are weaker.
Consumer Identity Today… Facebook Connect or Facebook/Twitter. Facebook Connect is the most successful consumer identity and is built on a proprietary protocol via a single identity provider. Their inducements for applications are sweet. The key component of both is the news stream. Type pad have been collecting stats on the consumer identities used to login to their service – and they offer a lot! 73% are still using their legacy Typepad ID. However in the last month over 62% of new signups have used one of the consumer federated identities on offer. MAny consumer applications seem to be promoting three 1. Their own profile 2. Facebook Connect 3. Twitter with other offerings shoved under more…
Convergence between Academic Identity and Consumer Identity?
Google Apps is an example of this. Every Google Apps domain is an OpenID provider. Shibboleth access into Google Apps. Users are being ‘trained’ in their consumer habits … to click on Facebook. Others will be pushing for their buttons to be more prominent. We don’t have a BUTTON we can put on this landscape (seems like this comes back to Rhy Smith’s work on the Publisher Interface Study and the need for an academic identity ‘brand’).
Assurance is gravitating to the lowest common denominator. Non-bouncing email address is the lowest consumer identity provider level of trust. We need to have modernisation of these systems and their Level of Assurances (LoA). We aren’t sure what peer validation of identity like in Facebook provides in terms of assurance.
Consumer world is rapidly realising that attributes are the key. We are going to have to solve the attribute aggregation problem.
There are multiple convergence options
- separate identities, applications, personas
- side by side with extended discovery
- attribute plumbing from campus to consumer providers (Google keen here)
- outsource entirely
Nate is whizzing through this now as he runs out of time. There is a lot of big ideas and jey concerns in here so this presentation is definitely worth revisiting and reflecting on.
How to prepare for the future?
- Be protocol agnostic.
- Expectations and functionality are driven by commercial and consumer identities.
- Users and Governments are unlikely to influence change
- Faculty will use best tools available
- Applications like money
If we want something more benign we have to consider the motivations of these key players and push them towards an outcome we think will be better. Nate is not sure what this better outcome is yet but does say that whatever happens DISCOVERY is the key control point. We need some sort of eduID although opinion divided here, but we must proactively consider partnerships with other identity sources.
Our current course is excellent. Our infrastrucutre will be key to most possible convergence routes and will be useful. Hence why this is a paranoid/cycnical presentation but not a downbeat one.
Phew interesting/exciting stuff but that was rapid and brain is definitely full now. Need a lie down/sleep on the train.
So question how does all this relate to Microsoft’s Forefront/Generva. Basically not sure lies behind the huge Forefront Marketing wall that Microsoft have built up. Internet2 is doing some interoperability testing with Microsoft’s stack. Microsoft wants to get into doing this attribute plumbing.
This was a really interesting event with some good keynotes and mix of parallel sessions, opportunities for discussion and a lot of fun. Thanks JISC … now to go back and wonder what to think and do about it all.
