The Berkman Center for Internet & Society will host Identity Mashup June 19-21 at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, MA.
Identity Mashup will explore the role of identity systems (tools that let users and merchants know whom to trust on the web) in furthering or inhibiting privacy, civil liberties and new forms of online civic participation and commerce. A variety of parties — governments, technology companies, health organizations, financial institutions, international agencies, and merchants among them — are clamoring for identity systems to address a spectrum of issues from terrorism and child pornography to identity theft and spam. The proposals vary dramatically from national ID cards with centralized data store and a single universal identifier to highly distributed “user-centric” models with distributed data stores and authenticated anonymity. The goal of this conference is to examine the problems these organizations are trying to address and assess which solutions might offer the greatest benefit.
During the conference there will be demonstrations of open, user-centric identity systems and applications. They also plan an “open mashup” in which conference participants and developers can collaborate to develop new identity, social networking, social commerce and collaborative applications.
I can’t be there, but it sounds cool. Here’s conference registration info.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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