What Is User-centric Identity?

There's a great--as in really really large--discussion going on right now in the Identity Workshop Google group, concerning the meaning of "user-centric identity," a term that's being thrown about these days among Those Who Know about identity. As many such terms--Web 2.0, anyone?--its core meaning is being disputed.

Dick Hardt, CEO of Sxip, started the discussion by proposing his own definition to the group and asking for trouble ... I mean, asking for others' thoughts.

Much of the ensuing discussion has been technical, but now Doc Searls--like me, a non-technical guy operating in technical domains--has stepped in with a contribution that I think is useful to anyone trying to understand this stuff, whether or not they're technically competent.

Doc says:

To me, and therefore (by ego-orginated projection) to every other non-technical person in the world, user-centric identity centers around the first person possessive pronoun: *my*.

It's *my* identity. It is not one conferred upon me by an organization outside myself. It is not a representation of me in a context other than my autonomous and independent self, operating in the larger world we call the marketplace. This is the identity we hope to more fully empower by our various projects.

As so often, Doc's on the mark here. The details of almost all identity management proposals verge on the mysterious, but the intention behind all of them if they're serious about being user-centric should be to address the needs of all our "autonomous and independent" selves.
Doc goes on:

In the absence of providing and communicating the immediate and tangible benefits of user-centrism, we'll continue getting the kind of reaction my wife has had from the beginning of my sojourn into this space: "I don't want more identity. I want less."

Less, that is, of what she gets on the Web today, which is the same MSO (Multiple Sign On) hell everybody else experiences.

The one adjective that appeals to her, out of all we've been using to describe the user-centric identity experience, is independence.

I've spoken of Doc's wife previously, and she remains an excellent stand-in (sorry, Mrs. Searls) for The User. She wants fewer complications--i.e., usernames and passwords abounding--more independence from the special demands made during any particular transaction.

So Doc says:

We have to keep the empowering real-world experiences we wish to support in mind.

And, frankly, we don't have those yet. Worse, customers can barely imagine them. Hence, there is no demand for them. Yet.

However, even if the developers of such identity management systems keep all these things in mind, an extremely difficult problem remains to be solved--almost certainly through repeated efforts over time: that of explaining the benefits of user-centric identity so that Mrs. Searls/The User can understand them.

Because the "empowering real-world experiences" exist at this point only in our imaginations, we have to give those experiences, as Mr. Shakespeare says, local habitation and a name. We have to dramatize them.

Like many others, I'm working on it.

Technorati Tags: user-centric identity, Identity Workshop, Dick Hardt, Doc Searls