June 15th, 2006
Catalyst: Day 2 begins
The morning of day two of Catalyst began with an early morning meeting of the Identity Gang. The majority of the meeting discussed the semantics of metaphors — by that I mean, the use of “cards” as a metaphor for identity (see Microsoft’s CardSpace). The metaphor (of course) has its problems, but the movement of Microsoft seems like the larger freighter whose wake simply cannot be ignored.
One bit of news to come out of the meeting was the re-formation of the Identity Commons. In essence, a non-profit is being started (under the name of “Identity Commons”) that will seek to provide “common infrastructure” (wiki, bank account, doughnuts, etc) for groups working on “identity stuff” — where the groups themselves form in a very “bottoms-up” fashion. The intention is to provide a more logical space for *all* of the work that’s going on around identity. We’ll follow this one to see how it forms and contintues.
Now I find myself in the first session of the Identity track. Interestinlgy, Jamie (CEO of Burton Group) is leading a discussion that is touching on how topics like Net Neutrality and Web 2.0 are affecting identity going forward. Catalyst - an audience made up largely of enterprise IT folk - feeling like it needs to touch upon these large issues shows just how powerful the issues and topics are.
