Via Tim Daneliuk: Andy Oram on The Long View of Identity:

Because I care intently about online identity myself, I was excited to attend the Identity Mashup conference at Harvard Law school’s Berkman Center, one in a series of identity conferences held there. Coming out of a technology space into this legal space was a bit of a culture shock for me. When lawyers consider things–to speak very broadly–they look at how things can hurt people, while I might make an initial categorization of identity systems along social lines, such as:

* Identity systems that help individuals find each other
* Identity systems that facilitate commerce
* Identity systems that promote communities
* Identity systems that support online government
* etc.

…or along technical lines, such as:

* Identity systems based on taxonomies
* Identity systems based on the web of trust
* Identity systems based on digital signatures
* etc.

In contrast, lawyers categorize them as:

* Identity systems that facilitate fraud
* Identity systems that violate privacy
* Identity systems that let corporations control people
* etc.

Fortunately, the far-thinking Berkman Center can encompass all these different categorizations at once. The conference turned out to be a wonderful mashup of legal, technical, social, and business aspects of online identity. The value of such a conference became most apparent on the third day, when the formal sessions that attracted some two hundred attendees came to an end, but over fifty people from all sorts of disciplines came to a kind of unconference with no preset agenda.