A few of my thoughts stimulated by the Eduserv Symposium ‘Evolution or revolution: The Future of identity and access management for research ’ that I attended yesterday (see http://www.eduserv.org.uk/events/esym09).
Identity management is not an area that I profess to have expertise in, or work in directly. However it does impact on me as a user and interests me for the following reasons:
- Our ongoing development of a social networking space ‘One Community’ across the 3 institutions of the South West London Academic Network (Swan).
- The multiple identities that students, academic staff and researchers have, at minimum normally including an institutional managed identity and one or more social web identities
- The growing number of learning activities that involve both institutionally hosted (or have legal agreements with external suppliers) technologies and third party social web tools, and all the inherent data protections issues etc.
I felt that Cameron Neylon in his presentation 'Oh, you're that Cameron Neylon: why effective identity management is critical to the development of open research’ (http://www.slideshare.net/CameronNeylon/oh-youre-that-cameron-neylon ) gave a good overview of the user issues with some potential solutions. He raised the issue of confusion between identities and associated problems such as being associated with views and opinions that you may not agree with through to proper recognition for published works. He also referred to a perceived increase in output 'measurement' and that some funding organisations are interested in tracking funded research well after the funding has expired. He further advocated openly available research data but in doing this identified issues of trust and trace back linked with identity. He felt that some kind of token based system might help verify identity and resolve these issues.
There was much talk of federated identity which I suppose really is the passing of identity information between trusted organisations allowing the user to authenticate to systems without multiple logins along perhaps with the provision of other information about role etc which could control access to services etc. Nate Klingenstein talking on ‘Opening up use-centric identity’ (http://www.slideshare.net/efsym/opening-up-usercentric-identity) discussed the divergence between enterprise-centric federated systems (e.g. University systems) and user-centric federated systems (e.g. OpenID and Facebook Connect). It was argued that currently Facebook Connect is dominating the user centric domain. Issues being faced were the potential dominance of a limited number of ‘identity’ providers, and the growth of the ‘button system’ where users click on the button of their preferred ‘identity provider’ rather than seeing the emergence of a true federated identity system. The ideal would seem to be an open and unified federated identity system but certainly Nate had mixed views on whether this would emerge.
From my perspective the ideal of a unified federated identity system, or at least moves in this direction, could have a significant impact on how 3rd party read/write web tools are integrated into learning activities alongside internally hosted tools. Maybe this is a process that help overcome some of the issues that we face with data protection, but I suspect only if the user has control over which parts of their identity are revealed. I am also interested to see how these technologies develop in terms of mobile devices and whether location becomes an identity element?
Related to the above mention was made of the Eduserv project funded project (http://thisisme.reading.ac.uk/) 'This is me' led by Shirley Williams. As part of this project resources have been produced to support students (an others) understanding of their digital identity and associated issues.
Keywords: Identity Management
