(I can misquote too Mark!)

The announcement of Facebook Connect brings another player to the identity provider space.

One of the interesting things about the announcement is the claim that it allows you to ‘leverage your real identity across the web in a trusted environment’. Hang on, my real identity in my facebook profile?? I don’t think so.

Many of these issues were discussed in the identity session at the JISC Innovation Forum last week. There are many complexities around the issues of your identifier, your identity, and the personas you use as part of that identity, and I’m not sure that a Facebook profile is a sensible starting point to establish ‘real identity’.

As pointed out in the session, many people provide inaccurate information on their facebook profile as they do not want this information to be publicly broadcast. Kim Cameron has previously pointed out the complexities of being economical with the truth about your date on birth in online profiles. Attendees at the session also pointed out that they often lied about the information provided in security questions for banks etc. (which pretend mother’s maiden name did I use??) so that relying on user provided information as reality can be fraught.

Facebook also provides a false interpretation of your identity by the limitations in how you can describe your relationships with people and applications. You are always a friend or a fan, as Paul Walk has pointed out.

So who can we turn to in order to provide trusted information about real identities in a meaningful and secure way, complying with data protection issues but also providing information that results in a useful service? I still think the role of a trusted broker of this information is very important for end-users and that educational institutions can continue to play a part in this space for their members and affiliates. It will be interesting to see what part as the user-centric identity space grows.

To miss-quote Mark Twain. The JISC access management team is remaining in place (and has always planned to be in place) until the end of this year. It doesn’t take a genuis to work out that the next few months will be very important for the UK Federation - and we will be there to offer our support.

More importantly we are here right now - and with two weeks to go to the big switch, if your institution has not joined the Federation please DO contact us to check that this isn’t going to impact on your students. There may be a few institutions that won’t feel any impact of not being in the Federation but I can’t imagine it will be many. So please get federation membership applications in. Some of you will have been waiting on decisions about third party options etc - these decisions will in most cases now have been made and joining the Federation will be the next obvious and urgent step.

This week, several of us are attending the JISC / CNI conference in Belfast. The theme of the conference is transforming the user experience. Whilst there are no specific sessions on identity management, it is an issue that keeps of creeping in to presentations.

Diana Oblinger opened the conference with an insightful presentation on Students and the Transformation of Higher Education. Diana set out a transforming approach to learning and teaching within education, which is bringing about a greater focus on collaborative learning and collaborative research. In her vision for education, she saw students and staff moving away from a reliance on single institutional affiliation and having a learning and teaching experience across multiple institutions and environments. In order to manage this vision, it will be important for us to move away from the current identity provision model that is reliant on the affiliation managing identities for their staff and student. The next step for identity management in higher education will be the tools that allow us to add our institutional affiliation rights to a more transferable identity. A big question is where will this identity be managed and by who?

Ian Rowlings’ presentation on the digital lives project matches neatly to conversations we have previously had here about the importance of managing the multiple personas we hold online. The digital lives project focuses on the need to bring together personal digital collections, but many of the questions explored by the project are equally relevant to manage digital identity itself.

I’ll keep on updating this post as the event goes on, but so far a lot of food for thought for the new access and identity management programme.

We had over 60 interested participants at our event in Birmingham which was aimed at teasing out from the community, specific areas of work that should be addressed in the coming JISC capital programme spend. The breakout sesson was interesting, I expected lots of call for shiny new identity management tools. However the consensus of the group was fixed on embedding the progress that we have already made, with particular attention on developers forums, institutional support, account linking, pilots with other sectors. Outputs that would inspire and generate populist appeal were particulary called for - with the “killer app” that would really demonstrate the promise of access and identity management, considered the holy grail of outcomes.
Presentations from the event will be up soon.