Owen Thomas wrote:
Hello Robin.
May I pick you up there on what you say about "spanning borders", and apply Clique Space to it. The notion of Clique spanning and Clique Space federations model many collaborative endeavours of the physical world in a virtual context.
We are doing very similar research in the EU funded TAS3 project. Our notion is to make the plumbing (e.g. metadata exchange and basic trust establishment) fully automatic, but then rely on trust computation and scoring to determine exatly how close collaboration is possible with a given partner. This also connects with user driven access control. Our business model for building the Circles-of-Trust appears as Annex E (really in the end of the document) of TAS3 architecture, available from http:/zxid.org/tas3/ "TAS3 Architecture Deliverable". Another interesting initiative in this same space is the Internet of Subjects (IoS), http://www.iosf.org/ which advocates that the institutional web of trust should be a not-for-profit entity, such as a trust (pardon the pun) or foundation. This model does not require government to perform this function, but it clearly states that the entity should not have a commercial conflict of interest. I am trying to architect this such that multiple such foundations could coexist. Now, regarding the proprietary technology of Institutional Web of Trust, if this IPR gets released on royalty-free basis, but with revocation of license in case of law suit, I would actually view this as valuable founding capital for the foundation. It is pretty clear that such universal CoT would be disruptive business model, so if the foundation had in its portfolio a couple of patents, it could quite well defend itself, and its users, against the hostile forces. Cheers, --Sampo
A Clique Space federations enable Cliques to "span" Clique Spaces. If you like, you could imagine a Clique as a pseudopod moving over and between federated Clique Spaces. Clique spanning is made possible through Clique Space federations, and realised when one or more of a Clique's participants are connected to more than one Clique Space.
There are, I believe, some versatile phenomena that occur through the notion of Clique spanning that have no physical analogue. However, the notion of federation and spanning in Clique Spaces is intended to address many questions relating to inter-organisational and inter-governmental cooperation.
Federations also address issues of trust in a Clique Space model. I, for instance, am Australian. Now, if the Australian government were to administer its own Clique Space, and federate it to a "public" Clique Space where anyone in the world can Connect, I could assert to everyone on the public Clique Space that I am an Australian citizen. My connection to the Australian Clique Space might also have tighter authentication requirements than on the public Clique Space, so you may be more inclined to trust devices associated to me when they're accompanied with Australian Clique Space membership.
Owen.
2010/2/1 Robin Wilton <futureidentity@fastmail.fm>
That's an interesting concept, and a position which may or may not fit well within the existing Kantara vision...
One potential issue is that the approach you describe may not translate well, either to implementations outside the US (for instance, where you describe the infrastructure being "created with government resources"), or to implementations which need to span borders in order to function (operationall or commercially).
In some ways, your description of a single, worldwide infrastructure meeting the full spectrum of political, social, commercial and financial aims reminds me of some of the early discussions of "Circles of Trust". Those discussions turned out, in the fullness of time, to be useful in understanding the fundamental concepts and building blocks of federated systems, but not the basis of a single architectural blueprint for all use-cases.
Yrs., Robin
On Sun, 31 Jan 2010 13:47 -0600, "Michael Duffy" < thetrustnexus@austin.rr.com> wrote:
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.
Robin Wilton