A Unifying Visual Metaphor

The prospect of digital identity working at Internet scale—and Internet strength—has occupied the attention of many in the industry for the better part of a decade. Perhaps that should come as no surprise—cross-domain authentication and authorization has long been one of the thorniest problems in networking. Blow it up to Internet size—and add the Internet’s staggering diversity—and even Don Quixote might start looking for a more possible dream.

Yet twice before the Net has beaten such interoperability odds. It owes its very existence to a no-frills internetworking protocol—TCP/IP—emerging from a thick protocol soup to become a lingua franca of packets. Less than two decades later another minimalist approach—HTML—turned the universe of information into a World Wide Web by giving us a universal way to link content.Could there be a hat trick for the Internet identity layer? And if so, what’s under the hat?

When I first started reading about Information Cards in Kim Cameron’s blog posts in 2004, it was a disarmingly simple metaphor: no more than the online equivalent of the cards we carry in our wallets to prove our identity and use for transactions every day. Could such electronic cards really be the key to an “identity metasystem” that can bridge security and privacy domains the same way Web pages bridged content domains?

Kim’s words pinballed across a blogosphere primed for such ideas, and one pocket where they landed was on the opposite coast where Paul Trevithick and Mary Ruddy had co-founded the Higgins Project. Higgins was driving its own Copernican inversion of the network universe: turning the user into the central organizing hub around which all their digital relationships revolve as the spokes.

To Paul, Kim’s vision of a consistent visual metaphor for all identity interactions resonated with his picture of the abstraction layer necessary to spare the user from any of the crypto mechanics taking place on their behalf. These two pieces fit together like interlocking halves of a continental shelf. The dialog between Paul and Kim steadily drew in others, and by mid-2006, after an open space session at the Berkman Identity Mashup at Harvard, there was “convergence on a metaphor” of Information Cards as a fundamental component of interoperable identity systems.

As big a step forward as that was, there remained much more road to travel. The Liberty Alliance had already shown how broad and deep the sea of identity interoperability can be, even with an armada of ships to navigate it under the OASIS SAML flag. And by early 2007, four tribes in the newly discovered continent of user-centric identity had united under the banner of OpenID 2.0 and brought the liberating power of user-controlled identifiers to the digital identity pioneers. The OpenID community formed the OpenID Foundation to serve as a trustee for intellectual property and a host for community activity and by early 2008 had attracted Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, VeriSign, and IBM to join as corporate directors.

Inspired by these efforts, the growing Information Card community realized that to bring this metaphor to full fruition required taking the same step—coming together into a common organization that would unify our efforts to create an interoperable identity layer. From one perspective this could be looked at as completing the “third leg of the stool” of what is often called the Venn of Identity (SAML, OpenID, and Information Cards). But from another perspective, you can see it as one of the logical steps needed towards the cooperative convergence among identity systems and protocols that will be necessary to reach a ubiquitous Internet identity layer—the layer that completes the hat trick.

Either way, those who have come together to form the Information Card Foundation know that creating it is only one step along a shared journey. The hard work lies ahead of us: unifying our efforts to bring the benefits of Information Cards to the fastest moving and fastest changing marketplace in history. I am proud to have been asked to help facilitate these efforts both within the Foundation and in its work with others. I invite you to join us—let’s make some history together!