Guest post: Digital Identity Management is ‘Fundamental’

I can’t believe it’s already a month since FAM11! For those that attended, I hope you had as much fun as I did.  For those that didn’t, the presentations are all available online.

In my closing presentation I tried to make the point that in order to provide effective identity management within the research and education sector we are going to have to make some changes. I argued three points:

• We need to legitimise the web as a place for scholarly research – i.e. don’t create scholarly silos.
• We need to fix the right problems – here I was mostly talking about not relying on work-arounds.
• We need to shift from constructing spaces online to supporting actions online.

The transcript of my talk is available on my blog if you want to read up some more. It’s a line of thinking that I’m really hoping to pursue and think about more this year, as this is perhaps not as coherent as I would like it to be!

I was pleased to see a recent OECD paper that places digital identity at the heart of how Government needs to be thinking. I would advise a read – it is very digestible and readable at under ten pages. It states that digital identity management is fundamental for the further development of the internet economy.

One of the report’s most interesting points concerned economics, describing how the use of different credentials at each and every service we use:

 “may create an unfair advantage for well-established service providers if users hesitate to join new alternative services to limit the total number of their credentials.”

It’s certainly not a line I have thought about before, but a clear argument in favour of externalising identity management from Service Providers.

With these recommendations from the OECD and the establishment of NSTIC in the US to tackle exactly this type of problem, it’s clear that governments are beginning to take digital identity very seriously.

It’s going to be really important for the education to sector to position itself within these debates and not to become siloed outside. The signs are promising from the US – InCommon was an early participant in the NSTIC discussions. I hope we can follow this example here in the UK too.