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Identity
There are starting to be building blocks for distributed identity, but you still have to put a lot of pieces together to get it to work.
Sections: Emerging Practice
Topics: LearningBlogosphere infrastructure LearningRemix social identity
I was talking with Jude Yew today, a Ph.D. student at Michigan's School of Information. He's interested in facilitating learning via online forums and has been working with me on my learning blogosphere and learning remix projects. The conversation veered around a little, and we came to his idea of using threaded comments to blog posts to promote class interaction.
I won't go into what I think are the merits of that idea, but one of the key points that came up was identity. How do you consistently identify the commenters? Last November, Kaliya Hamlin and I had a conversation on that very topic, and she was convinced that establishing identity was key to community work.
I have to agree. But, there's an easy hack to keep from making a big investment in infrastructure: just give everyone their own blog and aggregate the blogs. In closed groups, this is enough to keep the spammers out and ensure accountability.
It would be nice to loosen this up such that everyone could have an identity associated with a URL, as in the OpenID spec, and Mark Paschal's implementations for Movable Type. As a community builder right now, the problem you have is that you have to do a lot of infrastructure work to make that happen, not the least of which is educating users.
Bud posted this on May 19, 2006
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