Just to be clear, the Institutional Web of Trust may not be a product.

Our vision is that the identity infrastructure and services would be one corporation and the financial/marketing infrastructure and services would be another. The identity infrastructure will be created with government resources and be managed to a great extent as a public trust. Even though we have pending patents on this infrastructure and processes, the anti-trust considerations will be significant. We will have a monopoly on identity authentication and we expect significant government oversight of that monopoly.

Existing providers of identity management services should not see the Institutional Web of Trust as a competitor; rather, they should see the system as an infrastructure provider (similar to the electric power grid that has hundreds of energy providers). There will be hundreds if not thousands of different corporate identity systems and services based on this infrastructure.

Our goal is to form a cooperative ecosystem around this technology. Along with government agencies, the primary players in this ecosystem will be the mobile network operators (who will be able to meter services through their networks and take part in new marketing/advertising models) and the banks/financial institutions (who will gain by greatly reducing fraudulent financial transactions).

We think we have a technology that fits the vision of the Kantara Initiative: "Ensure secure, identity-based, online interactions while preventing misuse of personal information so that networks will become privacy protecting and more natively trustworthy environments."

Beyond this vision we hope the Kantara community will see that the creation of an effective worldwide identity infrastructure will result in a much better world.

Stated as a fundamental principle of economics: Identity is the foundation of financial rights.

"In battling poverty in the developing world with affordable financial services, there is nothing quite as democratizing as the ubiquitous cellphone. Few proponents of economic growth would quibble with the belief that banking is integral to the foundation that society is built on, but a full one billion of the globe’s five billion cellphone owners have no access to financial services. That makes mobile banking the perfect way to bring the unbanked and underbanked into society’s fold..." [Waiting for the Call ~ http://www.americanbanker.com/usb_issues/118_7/-357010-1.html]

Additionally, the Institutional Web of Trust will greatly influence political events by reintroducing classical Greek democracy to the world. Unlike current on-line polls that can be "spammed" multiple times by a single user or a group of users, on-line polls conducted under the Institutional Web of Trust will be validated for user uniqueness.

Users could volunteer to provide their demographic profiles to the on-line pollsters enabling political scientists to extricate meaningful conclusions from their polls. Ultimately, secure on-line voting will become a reality that will lead to an ever-increasing number of local, national and world plebiscites.

When I sit down and talk with people about the potential of this technology, once they realize the simplicity and pragmatic nature of the system, they come to realize the system is conceptual valid. The question then becomes how can this system be effectively implemented.

We have a three to five year plan to build out a prototype and fully test the system. We hope the members of the Kantara community will follow our progress and provide guiding insights along the way.

Best regards,

Michael Duffy
CEO / CTO ~ The Trust Nexus
http://www.thetrustnexus.com

Owen Thomas wrote:

Okay, I'm going to add my piece now. I'm going to plug Clique Space, but this thread has been about a product anyway, so why not...

While all of this Web of Trust and Wallet stuff is really interesting (and, sincerely, it is), something I believe has been missing in anyone's definition of identity is the individual. I would think that the only way trust is going to be had by anyone is if those "anyones" are left to be individuals, and no organisation represents itself as an overlord. No one (be they professional or lay) will accept a definition of an individual who is not as sacred in a virtual world of electronic collaboration as the individual is in a physical sense.

So, I've come up with Clique Space. Indeed, Clique Space provides an environment that might be administered by an organisation, but the administration of this environment is only performed for the purposes of maintaining continuity of its operation. Furthermore, a Clique Space may not be considered a singular entity: Clique Spaces may be run independently of each other, or may eve be federated so they can share information.

The sole purpose of Clique Space is to model real-time and near real-time activity of individuals over any combination of devices one might be using with any other combination of devices being used by any other individuals. One has to Connect to a Clique Space and Activate an Affiliation within the Clique Space to use one's one or more devices (called Client Devices) within the Clique Space within which one has obtained a connection.

I envisage a public Clique Space would be set up to provide a general use area. One of the main items of its charter would be that, except for necessary caching to ensure stability of the Clique Space and continuity of its device activity stream, no device activity from any individual would be persisted.

That's enough from me in this message. You might like to read a research proposal paper I put together; a version which, I observe, has been published by one of the many recipients of a copy: http://tinyurl.com/ydcmrw6

Enjoy, and I welcome comment on Clique Space.

Thanks,

Owen.

--
www.cliquespace.net
Clique Space(TM) Facebook Group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=81335296379
Owen's Garden of Thought: http://owenpaulthomas.blogspot.com/
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