Future Forward: Shaping Identity with Diversity & Expertise | Part 2

It's been a really long week so far. Several of us were at Identi diverse in Las Vegas all last week and we just came straight here because EIC is just that. Cool. So we wanted to do it.

The, the morning session earlier today was a bit more about diversity, equity, inclusion, the backlash with that, what that means, what that looks like, what, what actionable behavior seems to be reasonable at this point in time. And that was a pretty cool conversation. But the next part we wanna talk about is a little bit more about what it's like, you know, to, to be new in the industry, you know, and how you actually bring people up in the, in the field and grow, grow our pie so that more people can eat it. And helping us with that is Ian Glaser.

Look, I'm tired, hush hush you who's gonna talk about DAF and run our panel. Cool. Good morning everybody. So apologies in advance. You are going to see these slides later tonight. However important note when you see them, they will be the last thing you see before the party. So we will have a different tone at that point. It will also be my partner in crime, Alan Foster and I talking. So I'm gonna give you a slightly different take on what you're gonna see tonight.

So you can tell me afterwards which version you liked, the pre caffeinated version or the very sleepy version at the end of the day, you can tell me later, I don't think that there's a single one of us who's attending this conference whose careers have not been in some way influenced by others. Similarly, I don't think that there is any sort of stack of technology that we work with, an identity that hasn't been in some way contributed to by many, many other people.

And so in that regard, we can think about this industry as additive layers upon layers of work of other people that come together over time to achieve outcomes. Now, some of those people we've been really, really lucky to have on stage at DIC. So Kim Cameron being a, a perennial favorite, Kim whose legacy goes way back in identity and who usually saved his most provocative statements for this audience, for this stage. But his work known only as someone thinking about the implications of identity, but also people contributing real technology.

So his work in Info card, without it, there would be no EI DASV two full stop because you wouldn't have verified credentials because it's just info cards with a new set of terms. So Kim's had this passion for a long time to bring more people into the industry.

Similarly, our good friend Vittorio. Now Vittorio was always a perennial member of the stage here, and his passion for standards to contribute to them as well as to teach about them was legendary. I certainly, when someone asked me like, how does OAuth work? I'll be like, well, you can go read Justin's book and you can watch Vito's videos. That's what you do. Simple as that. But we need like a billion of these people.

I mean, maybe not direct clones, that'd be super weird. But what we need is people with that kind of passion and interest. So over the summer some friends and I created the Digital Identity Advancement Foundation. The idea is that the criticality of what we work on in identity management is not going away. It's only growing. And that we do not have as robust global representation and participation in that world as we really need, right? We're trying to solve problems that affect literally everybody on the planet. We don't have enough representation from literally everybody on the planet.

And one of the things we identified was that it is not inexpensive to participate in identity management. So if you wanted to come to an event like EIC, not everyone has the ability to do that. Not everyone has the ability to afford that. And apparently this year, in order to get here, you also needed a very big boat if you were coming from Southern Germany.

So, you know, every year there's a different kind of barrier to participation. But I think the important thing is this is about investing in the future. We don't know where the next wave of talent in our industry will come from. We don't know where the next Kim Cameron is hiding. And so our goal is to actually try to foster that, to try to grow some new giants in the industry. Now we do this right now through the issuance of awards.

We have two awards right now, the Kim Cameron Award, which is really about getting younger people involved in the industry, people that are starting out in their careers. And we've just closed submissions to the Vitor Award, which is really about getting people participating in standards, events, technical standards, events. We'll be announcing winners to Vito's Award shortly, but I get the privilege of introducing this year's winners for the Kim Cameron Award. So last week, Sophie and Matt were at Iver this week, Raj and ER with us. And we'll be hearing from them in just a minute.

And for those of you who are going to authenticate later in the year, in October, you'll get to meet Grace. So this is the first year that we've had representation at three of the major industry events. We have reasonably great global representation, which I am thrilled about. I'm also realizing that this is a slightly older slide deck, but that's okay. We'll be fine Raj and super. I have a better version of this slide that your names are at the top, so I'm gonna send you that version. But we're thrilled to be able to announce this year's winners.

And so when I talk about we, you know, if you're gonna cause trouble, that's good, but causing trouble as a group is a lot more fun. So Die Off was, was founded myself, Alan Foster, who you may know from his role in Katara, his role in Id pro his work at ForgeRock and Aaron Crow, her work at Fido. And at AWS we, we run as volunteers die off. And we're constantly thinking about sort of what comes next for the organization.

We are, at this 0.7 months old as an organization and running as fast as we can. We cannot do what we do without the support of many, many people. The story for Die Off really starts with the Open ID foundation. Years ago they created the Kim Cameron Award. They've been very generous in their support of the organization and being able to bring the next generation of leaders to these events to thank KuppingerCole and the EIC family, as well as people like Andre Duran, specifically at Ping Identity and many others who have been helping to support the organization.

And so, like I mentioned, Ah, we are just closed the Vittorio Bertucci Award. This award really is to support, like I mentioned, sup interest in technical standards. And there's two routes if you will. The first one is for someone just starting in technical standards. And what we're going to do is bring them to an internet identity workshop this fall because it's a very safe space to meet people that write the standards that are working on profiles.

And even if you haven't applied yourself, if you are interested in technical standards and you can find your way to California in the fall, this is a great place to get engaged with the standards community. It has, it has a bit of a safety net. It's a very, very welcoming and easy to engage with community. Now there's a second track we have inside this award, which is for people that have been more mature in their career, who either are in the midst of research as a graduate student or in sort of a professional career looking to do more very specifically in standards.

They may have a very strong opinion about, Hey, I've got this profile of OAuth, I've really gotta push through and I need some help to get there. But their employer, or maybe because of the grants they have at university, they can't get to an IETF event or something like that. We'll try to send them there. So we're gonna be announcing the winners to this reasonably shortly, I think in the next three weeks, which is a bit of a to-do on my list. But we'll get there. So we have the Kim Award, we have the Vito Award.

We are constantly thinking about ways to expand our programs and again, within the mission of trying to grow the global talent pool. If you have ideas about this, let us know if you have ways to support us. We're always looking for that too. We're a volunteer organization, it's just a couple of us. But you can learn more about that volunteer organization at DAF link slash about or a lovely QR code, which goes to the same. And if you feel like you can help contribute, that is always welcome and very deeply appreciated. So with that, think it's time to do a little panel. Let's do a little panel.

Alright, thank you everybody. Time for a panel.

Alright, let's get panelists up. This is your queue to come towards the stage. Are you joining us for this? Nope.

Oh, I thought you were. Do you want, oh, do you want me to No, no, it's okay. I can do this without you.

Yeah, sniff. It's okay, it's fine. So this is panel without a net. So why did I even put your picture in there? It was very generous because you like me very much.

It's true, it's true. Alright, I'll do this.

Okay, so panel without Annette, because everyone sitting in front of you has flown, mostly everyone sitting in front of you has flown thousands of miles to be here and are in various states of consciousness. So what we wanted to talk about was sort of a view from the beginning and how people got into identity, what was interesting to them.

This will, you'll keep me honest on time, this will run a little bit, but I wanted to share the questions. We'll come back when we do intros, we'll be talking to these questions, but it's not just, I wanna hear what these three awesome people have to say about it. I want you to keep some of these questions in your head throughout the week, right? Because there's gonna come a point in the week when you're gonna be like, what am I doing here? I'm kind of tired, I've been in a lot of sessions and it's all starting to sound the same. So it's good to come back to these questions and remind yourself.

But with that, we're just gonna go left to right, grab a mic and we'll do a quick round of introductions. Supr, why don't you start? Hello? Hello. Thank you Ian.

Sorry, lost my voice traveling, I think almost 15 hours. So my name is Supr pr, so I'm, I'm from Bhutan. I hope you know where Bhutan is. It's a small, tiny little country sandwich between India and China. So in the Himalays. So I work for Duke holding in investment and I have been into the identity space for last four years. So I've been working as a project manager for the Bhutanese National Digital Identity Project and I'm happy to share that we are live, we are in production and we have now almost a hundred K users onboarded on a platform.

So I'm happy to share our experience and maybe my journey through the identity space. Thank you. Yep. Raj? Hello everyone. Namaste. Good morning. It's a little bit cold here in Germany, in Berlin. Yesterday I, I only day I arrived. I'm coming from India and my name is Raj Patel. I work at Hyper Mine. I started my journey towards back I'm and seeing this, I mean various peoples in identity community. So I started my journey two years back, as I said, as a intern and then delving into different identity solutions. I specifically work in SSI, self-centered identity space.

And I'm always pushing the boundaries of that across the India, doing developer workshops and across the universities and trying to help the developers to understand this protocols, you know, better ways and you know, helping and learning a lot of identity from the community. Yeah. Last but not least.

Yeah, hi. So I'm Rachel Sang. I'm originally from the US but I found identity in Germany. So I'm actually living in Germany for some time now. So I came by boat, Southern Germany, not actually, but we have a lot of flooding if you didn't hear.

So, yeah, and I, I'm mostly coming at identity actually from more of a non-technical perspective. So I originally studied marketing and then I studied, I did my master's in economics and now I'm doing more user experience research, but also socioeconomic research on identity and how different technologies like SSI or our different transitions or in things like that could impact identity and looking at these use cases or looking how the user experience with these kind of security and privacy Yeah, implementations can look for the user and how this would affect long-term adoption of identity.

So, Cool. Alright, we have multiple mics so we can pass another one around so that way we, that way.

Ooh, everyone's got one. This is, this is gonna be messy. So who wants to start? How did I want, I want to hear an origin story. Like how did you get into identity and first person to raise the mic gets it. Otherwise I'm gonna call on someone and then that's gonna get messy.

Okay, Super good. Yeah, Let me get started. So basically my background, so I'm not an IT person of course I did my engineering, but mostly in electronics and power engineering. So I worked in hydropower sector for almost 10 years. And then as I came back from my masters, I had this drive to, to, to learn more about it. And then I think the, the, the storm of blockchain and technology or slowly building up in Bhutan. So then I shifted and, and then left my earlier job and joined DHI. And even in DHI, they offered me two jobs.

You want to go to the electrical field or you want to join the, the, I think newly established identity project. And then I think I was fascinated to, to join the NDI because I think one, it was more towards it. And then probably I just wanted to shift from my earlier job. So one thing how I landed up in identity was I think myself as, as a user, as as a citizen of Bhutan, I, I could, I could see that of course we do have a lot of investments or, or kind of programs which are being product in Bhutan in terms of building the IT infrastructure.

There are a lot of like, we call it digital dral, digital dral program. So, but then the, the core problem actually, even if a lot of these IT services was being introduced in the country, we were still facing the core issues in terms of identifying yourself digitally on, on, on those platform. And then if we talk about the Bhutanese population, we are just very small as 750,000 people. Out of 750,000, roughly around 450,000 people might own a smartphone.

So out of 450,000 people, only around maybe 150 or 200,000 people actually make, use full use of the smartphones because most of them use only for Facebook or WeChat is very famous in Bhutan. So, so we weren't actually kind of going in that direction. So where we were making full use of the available technologies globally. And then in 2020, his mati the king. So we are a constitutional monarchy in Bhutan. So we have the, the king here in Bhutan and he's a very visionary king.

So on on on 2020 as we were trying to the model, the identity kind of program for Bhutan, we were actually designing more towards what is existing like in, in, in Estonia or, or in Singapore, kind of a centralized kind of identity model. But then we had this royal audience from his match, the king, and then he immediately said, you need to think about decentralized identity. And we were all kind of point blank.

We, we didn't have any knowledge of what is decentralized identity. I have a whole lot of questions how a monarch knows about self-sovereign identity. We'll get there, we'll get there.

So then, yeah, so early days, so then we started Googling, we started connecting with people and I think we found some of the kind of fight people. I would say it was Andy from ENY Drummond I think, who really guided us. Drummond here, there and then yeah, we, we, we, we, we read through the the SSI book. I think it's a very comprehensive book. I think it gives a lot of idea in terms of technology, in terms of business, in terms of governments, how you're going to do it. And then slowly with help of Andy trauma and then few other expertise.

We designed the whole system about how we can build an SSI best identity system in Bhutan. I think now four years down the line. I really feel very proud that now we have the, the life system in Bhutan and now people are slowly adopting to the, to the new technology. We have the life app and things there in, in, in, in my wallet right now. So I can use my wallet to, to sign into a lot of e-government services. I can get a lot of credentials like my employment credentials, my university credentials, which I can further use to open a bank account.

Or we are also working into integrating more services like to get your driving license so that you need not to carry any physical documents. So it's kind of been a very overwhelming journey last four years.

And then, yeah, and then I think making it to Berlin, I think thanks to dive, I think was, was been very kind enough to having sponsored me to travel here. We, being a very small country, very small economy, it's kind of difficult for us to travel around or maybe meet people. But I'm very grateful that I'm here in Berlin and able to meet a lot of bright people I think, whom we can share our experience, whom we can also learn from them. And I'm really happy that they have that has given this opportunity. Of course. Thanks Anne.

Of course, of course. Another origin story. Okay. Okay.

So I, I'm doing identity since last more than two years. I call myself as identity kid because I do have a different perspectives look towards identity. Fortunately I got hopped directly into the SSI after my college.

So I, I was doing engineering and in last year of my engineering, I got the internship at Hyper Mind where I'm currently working. I, I was very good in front end and they have just started with the SSI, you know, SDKs and APIs. They didn't have infrastructure at like blockchain and all.

And I, I got the role there and I started developing the front end and we built A-A-D-I-D based marketing tool, which is a go to market with the DID. And we tried first time there with the ID wallet and attaching that ID via wallet to the marketing tool and that specifically for crypto projects because that time it was a bull run and everyone wanted to have a, you know, verified and true users on their particular platforms. So that time I really got to know about identity, but I was driven by the blockchain concept, you know, from the college.

And when I complete my last year engineering, then I got the full-time offering and joined the hyper mine and then the identity journey starts and I started working on application of SSII build developer tools, so, so that developers can learn from one tool, they can play around dds, VCs and you know, all the, all things are in, in the SSII got the first point of contact in identity from Vwa, which is one of my founder at Hyper Mind. And then there are so many peoples, I literally cannot take names because it's difficult to take every name, but I have so many people's I'm learning.

And there's a one book called Learning Digital Identity by Phil Phil Windley, which is so inspiring, so much inspiring for me. I have been reading that from I think last one year and he's one of my inspiration in identity. I got to know about Kim from the book only.

And yeah, I also met tomorrow, today morning really learning the lot from the people. And for me it's like, it's a great experience to be here. I I wanted to attend the conferences, you know, happening around the globe but couldn't make it and DIF bring me that and very thankful for the to towards the team Y and everyone in the team.

Yeah, that's how my journey. Alright, Now Rachel's gonna give us something totally different, which is gonna be awesome.

Yeah, it's really hard to follow up. It's really, really nice to hear your guys' stories and, And also I should point out experiences, Rachel is a previous Kim Kemmerer award winner, so I was very remiss in in mentioning that.

So yeah, as a, as an alumni of the program Yeah, as an alumni. As an alumni I would say that actually this has brought me a lot of opportunities and I actually have a lot of new projects from people that I met at the EICA couple years ago. So I wish that also for you guys and I think that this is a, a great program that helped me connect.

I'm, I'm from the research field or from academia. So I mean you can understand that we don't always have the funding to come to industry conferences or have these kind of opportunities prioritized, but I think it's actually very important for the identity industry and for the development of identity to, to mix these different groups of the industry and and and academia or from, from research because a lot of the times we're trying to solve the same problems in different ways and actually if we would just talk to each other we might accelerate that process and also learn from each other.

But that's a whole nother side topic we're talking about or origin stories, right? Yeah. So my story is definitely not maybe as interesting as you guys is, but I started actually in marketing and psychology. I did my bachelor's in that in the US and afterwards I was looking for internships in Europe and one of the internship positions was at Fraunhofer Institute here in Germany in the team of identity management. And I always had an interest and a curiosity for technology and as I looked more into, okay, so what would I actually actually be doing here?

I started to realize and going down the, the identity rabbit hole so to say, just like how vital it is for so many technologies and what a key yeah aspect it is for a lot of everything. So that was something that intrigued me and especially since this was a team that was an interdisciplinary team. So I felt seen, I felt like that this, it sometimes is hard in an interdisciplinary team because you have like people coming from different perspectives and you're like, oh well yeah, this user experiencing how can we improve it?

And then from a technical side, well that's gonna be a lot of work or this doesn't make sense or this has like x, y, Z problems. And, and I think actually this whole experience is just taught, taught me to how important communication is and how important it is to, yeah, to have these honest conversations and to have these opportunities on a small scale and as a team but also on a larger scale with other people in the industry and how important it is to hear all these different perspectives to have a hopefully successful outcome. Right?

So yeah, it started there, but why I stayed was actually for that point and for, yeah, my personal passion is, is trying to find this balance between privacy, security and user experience. Which is kind of an ongoing theme on in many yeah. Directions or channels of identity.

So yeah, that helps. So I want the audience to think for themselves about their own journey. There are many of us who started in this industry having no idea that we already started in this industry, that we started with a product, right? We just had a product to go work on, go install this thing, right, go make this thing run.

And that, that was certainly, that was certainly my origin story was I was working at Oracle as a pre-sales engineer working on database stuff and a friend of mine said she had attempted to install the directory and it was the only piece of software that ever made her cry. It was so difficult to work with. So I was like, okay, well let me go check that out.

And I, after wrestling with it for quite some time, got it installed and then I went, what the hell do I do with this thing? And then forgot about it and then years later found myself at an identity company. But what's interesting to me and hearing all three of you is the path into identity now looks very, very different.

At least there's the opportunity for it to be very different in the sense that whereas hearing, well look, I started from a developer's perspective and it was quickly moving into identity for example, or thinking from a maybe more sociological marketing perspective of how do we balance the, the natural tensions between identity security and privacy or thinking about just as we start to build whole cloth type services, identity becomes so important to these things. Those kinds of entrances. I don't think were as available years ago, but it certainly weren't as that obvious.

And I think that's really interesting to hear that the difference about that. The one thing I find heartening is that people that come to identity come from a variety of backgrounds. So there's someone sitting in the front row who comes to this industry by way of library sciences. Some of the best identity architects that I know of don't have college degrees, right? They just started working on these programs.

And so the thing that I find so interesting and so gratifying is that you can be incredibly successful in this industry with any kind of background, with any kind of background, which means that there's just a chance that we can actually democratize the things that are going on. So another question for the panel, what's been the biggest surprise so far in working with digital identity? Like doesn't have to be big or major, just something that you found like, oh, huh, I didn't expect that to be true. I think we'll go, we'll go middle out.

So rush, how about you? Actually the award itself is more surprising for me. I have been doing developer workshops since last one year because I felt like we built everything related to SSI infrastructure and at that time we got to know that okay, what we do with this, right, because we need to convey this technology to technologists as at least right to developers so that they can build some useful things with that. And I was good in communication because we are small company, I was attending the events also in bangal, different technical events and I have, I got good connections there.

So I started doing, you know, workshops across the universities and first time I got into one of the unconference in Bangalore. So it happens there, they have listed my name for the DID workshop. And that that time I realized okay, I need to, I need to start with this. And there are so many people from different backgrounds came. It was really surprising for me 'cause that's the first workshop I was doing. And for developers, whenever they talk, they talk technically they don't talk, you know, directly explaining the identity because identity is one of the most dynamic technology I feel.

It involves philosophy, it involves technical things, but whenever developers speak they, they directly go into the technical things. And that's, that was the first thing that I did. And realize also I need to improve more on, you know, some basics of identity, like normal philosophy of identity. And from there I started, you know, learning about what basically identity is how, how we can bring some 50 peoples or a hundred peoples on one one page before we start talking about technically. And that that that first workshop I got realized I need to improve a lot. I need to improve a lot. Yeah.

Cool. Rachel, I would love to follow up on that. So one of my surprising things that I found is how difficult it is with terminology and what language we speak to each other at. I was like, you could get 50 people on the same page. That's crazy. Right? Right.

I mean, so coming from like a user experience perspective or, or even like my different backgrounds of like economics and I also study economics and marketing and then also so very non-technical and then coming from a u user experience point of view where you're working with technical people and you're working with the same product and, but your terms that you use are totally different. Or like, so how complex terminology is in identity and speaking this common language when it's all like, yeah, it's interesting.

So one of my projects is working on improving the user experience of different digital wallets in Germany but also on EU level. And sometimes we've had long conversations.

Okay, so what does it mean when you like retrieving a credential? So from a use user eventually you maybe understand this, but it's, for some people this is super, what does a credential, what does this mean? Is this a document?

Is this, I don't know, I, I don't understand that I don't want to use it, you know, so like, but if you're in the field, you eventually learn this techno technical jargon but at the same time then you're like, okay, can we change it to be this phrase? And like, no, no, that doesn't fit at all.

So yeah, so this is just probably a very small surprise but it's something that keeps me busy. Well You know, following off of that thought and, and this is something that, so last week was the identi diverse conference in the US and so there's a lot of us basically just off the plane. And one thing I'll observe there was I would say safely 75% of the attendees, it was their first time being at the event. And I'm gonna go a little bit further as to say it's also probably safe that of them about 50% were probably new to identity.

Now I don't have our data on that, but I have a pretty good sense that's the case. And one of the things that I've seen about identity is we've been so obsessed with the how it works that if we have this new group of people coming into the industry, that's not where we need to start conversations. We have to start conversations on the outcomes, right? I can get access to social services, right? I can get an easier way to more consistently prove who I am without having to go drudge up a bunch of paper documents, which I may or may not have, right?

Having conversations about outcomes is a place where I think we can get that 50 people on the same page at least I hope so versus talking about the how and the definitional thing. But for those of us who've been doing this for a while, we're really obsessed with the how and we need to get over ourselves a little bit because it's interesting that we can start talking about some of these outcome things. So just something that's been rattling in my head over the last couple of days.

It's like, oh yeah, there's a conversation change coming, but super. What about you? A surprise that you, you you had along the way?

Yes, I think I, I'll just share, share, share our journey in, in terms of the price. 'cause we started with a very small team of eight. We had to really brainstorm.

I think I, I relate to her with, with I think trying to understand a lot of terminologies and the technologies and how it's done and all those things. I think those were the initial challenges for us. And then the other challenges was also since we also wanted to have a regulation there in Bhutan. So we have now the NDI act of Bhutan 2023. So as we were drafting the regulations, we, we, we really had this tough time in, in terms of explaining the, the, the people, especially the bureaucrats about the benefits, about the vision, what his master actually had.

Because we didn't have a demonstration to so them, we didn't have a use case to sew them. So it was kind of very difficult in terms of making them understand what benefits it brings in by implementing a decentralized id. And even today I think it has become much easier right now. 'cause right now since we have a working demo and then a lot of use cases, so now we have changed our strategy instead of talking about how it is working, I think we directly go and try to make people understand first about what is the problem you're facing today and how this product will solve your solution.

So we talk about the solution to the people and then I think that's really important in terms of making them realize the benefits. I think that that has been the biggest change right now as we do our marketing, as we do our communication and education to a lot of unreached people in Bhutan. And because it's like, for them it's very difficult for, for example, Bhutan, we are a very remote place. There are places where we have to take horses or walk for days to reach places.

So, and, and it very difficult to make them understand what's the benefit of having these digital identity because hardly they might use that digital identity maybe once in a year or once in two years. But then I think, and then we, being a very small society, like even if I don't want to see you Ian tomorrow, we, we we head up like we, we crashed each other. So we are very small society and we, we trust each other a lot. So giving you my pin number, giving you my username.

Okay, my, my i my password. I think it is like father giving a username password to the son and, and in the family.

It's, it's, it's been like very social things and suddenly we're bringing this, ah, you need to have your independence. You need to be self-sovereign, you need to have your own wallet. Don't share your password or, or or username to others. I think again, this is a social stigma. What comes as a change in Bhutan.

Oh, why, why, why should I hide my password with my son or with my daughter, right? Because I don't think they'll do any mis mischievous thing. But then I think slowly making people understand about the importance of debt security, debt privacy. I think this yet to come as a societal change in Bhutan, but I think slowly people are getting aware of scams, phishing attacks being happening to them.

I think as we bring in more use cases and, and then try to explain them how we will solve a lot of problems with SSI based app, I think we, we, I think that, that that's how we are trying to solve the time. Thank You. So let's just as a bit of a wrap up, what I want to talk about now, very brief answer. Pick one thing. It could be anything that if you had had it, it would've helped you along in your career as an identity practitioner.

So while you're thinking of it, I I will say for me, the one thing that I wish I had when I was younger in my career was more opportunity to network with peers in the industry. It was hard and expensive to sort of find one another. And I think now years later as I look at things like Audi Pro and the the community there, I definitely see things, you know, value where it's like, man, it would've been so much easier if I had this years ago. So now just very briefly, what's one thing if you wish you had it would've accelerated or helped you along in your journey?

I, I think a di difficult question for me because I'm, I'm young. One year You could say like, look I want Phil Windley to come to Bangalore and hang out with me.

That, that could be, yeah. Alright, we'll get we on the Plane from last year. Yeah. So from last year I, I've been trying to make IAW to, to go IW and meet so many peoples there, but I couldn't make it. And this EIC make me like meeting people from different parts right of the world because it's center of the world in Europe. So from east also people are coming and from west also people are coming. So yeah. So I had in my mind that I, I could do, I could do this LA last year, but eventually I'm meeting people at EIC and yeah that's all Cool. Alright. Meeting people Rachel Super.

Yeah, I think one thing I wish I had when I started like the NDI project for Bhutan was probably EIGS 2.0 at that time so that I can refer to it or maybe some architects reference framework. I wish I had regulation when I was starting out Or You heard it here first. Yeah.

Or, or some are or some actually decentralized based identity, which is working well in globally. At the time it was very difficult to, to look some for examples. I couldn't find any regulations, I couldn't find any reference frameworks. Probably the, the, the brightest part was I could go through the SSI book and I think that really helped.

Okay, so I think today, I think now since you already have your E ideas 2.0, you have your A RFI think it's much easier now so that you can already have a template kind of thing which you can just adopt and then follow and then build the product. So I wish I had those things for What about you Rachel? Take us out. This is really tough because actually I have to say I felt very privileged in my experience in identity or maybe very lucky because at the very beginning I actually had a project with Oex and Don Tebow and, and Sue and they introduced me to a lot of people now in the industry.

And I think that that was a missing part that I felt was the practical side of it. So, and how it would be actually applied because it's wonderful in research land to do all these studies, but to see how it's applied and to make sure that this actually has a real impact was something that I was always longing for and I was lucky enough to meet yeah. Someone or an, or an organization that gave me that opportunity to be able to mix more my circles and to yeah, hopefully yeah, contribute to that.

So I think to close, I think one of the things that's, that's fascinating about identity to me is it's very visceral that it affects everybody and that because of that, all of us, no matter our roles could have an opinion and can have a stake in the process. But at the end of the day, this is really about social interaction. It's about how I interact with society. It's about how I interact with corporations with one another.

So I'd ask the audience, I challenge the audience to sort of keep these kinds of questions and that point that Rachel made in mind as they go through the rest of the week. There are some amazing people here to meet. If you haven't already, there are old and dear friends to see again if you haven't seen them already. And with that, I want to thank our panel so very much. And thank you for coming. Thank you so much.

So just, just as a note, one of the people that's here this week is Phil Windley. So you should like say hi to him. He still here?

Yeah, he's here. No Joke.

Yeah, he's wearing Crocs. He's kind of, he's, he's dude. Holy here.

Do, Do, do. Should I move?

Do, Well you can just hang out there if you'd like to. I Dunno what's coming up next. The body of knowledge. I've heard of that, but I'm gonna move.

Yes, but you're gonna gimme the clicker first. I'll give you the clicker. There You go. Thank you.

Okay, so how many of you are familiar with the ID Pro Body of Knowledge? Thank you for the folks that raised their hands, because if you didn't and I knew that you knew about it, I would be very disappointed Or contributed Or contributed to it.

Okay, so TLDR, if you, if, if nothing else is useful to you, here's how you get there. From here you go to the ID Pro website body dash of knowledge. But there's also a GitHub repository where I encourage people to, if you wanna actually like engage in some discussion or if you find an, an error or anything like that, that that's there for some reason you just simply prefer markdown as your format. And I've worked with a bunch of standards people where if it's not in markdown, it doesn't exist. And if you're curious about, well, what else are you even trying to put in the body of knowledge?

I have this like ideal table of contents where if I was queen of the universe, which I'm not, but if I were then the table of contents for the final volume one would look like what's there also in GitHub. Okay, so the stats, as of May, we have 35 articles.

They are, they range from topics on access control to an introduction to identity information about standards and laws. Not generally, you know, rewriting what's in the standard or law, but just a, so you wanna know about OAuth, here's what you know, here's where you can find the information about awa. So you wanna know, you've heard that there's some ISO documents that talk about identity management and identity architecture. Are they worth paying the 160 Swiss francs to buy them? So it gives you sort of a, a description of what type of information can you find in there.

There's, you know, general digital identity, account recovery, identity life cycles. There's information about non-human accounts. There's quite a bit since the Body of Knowledge was initially published in, I wanna say March of 2020, we've had 172,000 views from about 185 countries on the planet. We've had about 31,000 downloads and the most popular article to date, and it's not that it isn't a great article, but for the life, Hmm, that's really the most popular article.

Yes, That is indeed the most popular article. Identity and access management, workforce planning. I can't tell you why because of course your statistics don't do that. But what we see on average is about 5,000 views a month. And then there was that one where we hit 25,000 views in that month and then it dropped back down to 5,000 views a month. There are some people in this world that really liked that article. So we also have translations, not a whole lot of them, but we received a grant from Amazon Web Services that allowed us to translate everything from the first 10 issues.

We're now up to issue 13 into Spanish. There is rumor has it a translation into Japanese where one of our ID pro members just thinks this is a fun thing to do in his spare time. So that's also out there in the world today. I wanted to give you a little bit of background. So when I first started with ID Pro, I started as principal editor and that is still my role, separate and discreet from the role of executive director, which I only started doing last year. Generally we try and publish three or four issues a year. And an issue can contain anywhere from two to five or six articles.

The the point in staging it that way is to give the various people that do the reviews sometime to actually go through the articles, read them, understand them, offer the feedback, that kind of thing. So what, what the publication and review cycle looks like is, of course it starts with someone coming to me usually with not, not a complete article.

It's, I almost never have some come, someone come to me with a complete article, they come to me with a, I want to do something. Would you like to say more about that?

Wait, well I don't know. What do you need? And so a conversation happens and often a co-author is found so that they can actually collaborate. 'cause it's so much easier to write with another person. Once that's been sorted, and this is not a a private process per se, very often they'll reach out to the ID pro Slack environment and say, Hey, I've got this. Does anyone wanna do like a pre-read and tell me where you think there are gaps? They'll do that, but eventually it gets to the point where they're like, okay, we think it's kind of ready now.

And they submit it to, they basically submit it into our publication system, which is called Janeway. It was designed, it's an open source publication system specifically for open access journals.

So we, we use it as much as we can. At that point we get at least two people to do a peer review. It's not a blind peer review because community frankly isn't that big. You would know who wrote it. And often the peer review results in some really great conversations. So it goes back and forth. The p the peer reviewers will then tell me, 100% ship it just as is, by the way. That almost never happens. Or they'll say it's pretty good, we'd like some, we'd like some revisions or they might say, okay, no, seriously, it it's got good bones, but it needs, it needs some pretty heavy help.

And they do have an option of saying, you know what, this is, this is Mrs. The Mark, don't publish it.

I then, you know, have a certain amount of, of editor editorial judgment and then I decide what to do with it from there. More often than not, it will be to go back to the authors and say, all right, I need you to make some changes. Here's the feedback that we've received.

Ready, set, go. They get that back to me. And now I have two groups that get to look at it and they both are supposed to answer different questions. There's a body of knowledge committee and their job is to look at these articles that come in and say, okay, thinking about what the body of knowledge is intended to be, does it fit?

Is this, is this a right thing? And occasionally they have said, no, this, this really feels more like a blog post. And we have space for blog posts. We like blog posts, but that's not what the body of knowledge is.

So, okay, that's their job. Does it fit in the body of knowledge? But then the id, id pro board also looks at it and their question is, from the reputation of the organization, are you okay with publishing this article? Not all articles get through this process. Sometimes the answer is, you know, it's, it's, it's okay, but it's not a right fit for what we wanna do. It's not quite there in terms of quality for a almost an academic article, right?

So it may, it may get rejected from the system once it's published. I put, as I mentioned, I put a copy in GitHub at which point people are encouraged if you have feedback on that article, especially if you're not an ID pro member, go there, offer comments, offer feedback, offer suggestions, and then then periodically we're going to review everything that's in GitHub and we're going to turn around and say, all right, you know what, this article, it was awesome in 2020. We need to update that. And so that's something we will do. Some articles age extremely well.

There's one that was written by a gentleman named Tom Smiting Hoff called The Laws' Governing Identity Systems. It's a, it's, and that article, I'm pretty sure we're never going to really need to change it because it's talking about the different layers of laws and regulation that touches on identity from contract law all the way up to like international treaties. And what that means for, as you're thinking about your identity management programs, The copyright for it is in ID pro's ID IPR policy. And you can read that. But ultimately the licensing is a creative commons.

No derivatives, no commercial. So we want to make sure that this is as freely available as possible to the world. And given the way CC buy licenses work, it always will be. So I know you all wanna help, I can tell It is all about the content. The kind of content we need most is in that, is in that like ideal table of contents. And there's like some of the gaps that I'm aware of. For example, authorization is really, really hot right now.

Okay, so how did we get to this point? Can, can someone write, we do have an article on policy-based access control, but like I would love to see something that says, all right, we got to policy-based access control by way of role-based access control and here's why. And before we got to role-based access control, we were focused more on like group management. And then if you go back far enough, it was something else, right? I want to see an article that that that offers that kind of breakdown. 'cause I think that would be really useful for people coming into the industry.

And that's kind of, you know, while the body of knowledge is open to anyone at any stage in your career, what we wanted to see happen was for the people who are new, the people who say, look, I'm, I've been doing this for two years and I still don't know a darn thing. To give them a leg up to give them something that would make it a little bit easier to have a resource available that talks everything from like the basic meat and potatoes of what is at the heart of identity to some of the more speculative things about maybe decentralized identity.

Speaker 10 00:56:04 We need to talk to my business partner, Graham Williamson, who's written the latest report for on policy based access controlled and all of all of the areas. And he'd, he'd be the ideal manager, I think, to write a authorization from where to go. Well fortunately I talk to Graham once a month.

Oh, you talk to Graham, how about Speaker 10 00:56:26 That? So there we go.

Yeah, he also wrote our non-human identities article. He co-authored that one and he's on, he's great.

He's, he's the Speaker 10 00:56:34 One to do authoring. I'm certainly not to do, I do the consulting anyway.

Sorry, interrupt you. It's all good. It's all good. So a couple other, the interesting topics that we're after, we do have an article on the sort of, how many of you're familiar with the concept? Joiner mover lever handful. Okay. We have something about that. But there's, each one of those stages has more interesting detail that you can dive into. And I think having some articles on each one of those would be really interesting. Last week we got into a side conversation, there may have been some whiskey involved about writing an article on how you talk about identity to a business executive.

That actually is a really good body of knowledge article and I'm hoping to see that happen. Okay, but why, why do I keep having challenges in terms of why isn't the body of knowledge bigger? Because a lot of us are now, well past our university days and actually writing papers is hard.

You're, you're not just writing a blog post of an opinion. You're actually done.

I mean, some of times it is a lot of opinion because the person writing it happens to be the expert in the field and this is what they know because they've helped design the field and that's pretty good. I like that. But largely it's, it's it's original content. It has been researched, it's a bit more academic in tone. And there's an awareness that since Id Pro has a certification program, that this is the kind of material that feeds that certification program.

There's pressure, pressure to get it right and not only is there pressure to get it right, but while you're trying to think about how to do that, what you're staring at is a blank page. And a lot of people find that wildly intimidating.

I am, I was raised, you know, by wolves I think is the, the official term where I was taught how, how do you know if spaghetti is done? Anybody, you throw it at the wall. If it sticks, it's done. So what I do when I'm dealing with a blank page is I just start throwing words at the page. And if the words sort of stick and I can then create an outline, then obviously it's, it's an idea that's done and ready to, to move on. But not everybody was raised by wolves and they don't have that mindset. So it's a little difficult.

There's also often an assumption that yeah, you know, but I have, I really need to be an expert before I write anything. Well, how do you become an expert?

Well, generally by researching, by learning. And what better way than actually forcing some structure to your thought by writing it down and developing, you know, your outline, the people who are learning write some of the best articles that we have. So that should, that should, that should never be a barrier. But I understand why it is, and I know modern humans love to write blog posts. I love to write blog posts. And this isn't a blog post, but the, the style and tone and that difference often tends to be a little bit difficult for people to get through.

So if you are interested in engaging further as an author, we certainly have, you know, an infinite amount of room for material. But if that's not quite up to your speed, if you'd rather maybe not go that far, but you would be okay with saying reviewing material, then there's a place to sign up for that and you select what topics you're interested in so that when I have something that someone submitted and I'm trying to figure out who am I going to get to review authorization, I, I now have a pool of candidates that I can reach out to and that makes my life a lot easier.

But perhaps you, you're interested in sort of the strategy of what's the body of knowledge all about? Where should it go? How should it get there? What's our five year vision for this? Then that's where the Body of Knowledge committee comes in.

They meet, there's the folk, the Atlantic friendly time zone that meets one week and then that alternates with the Pacific Friendly time zone for those folks in Australia, New Zealand and Japan that might be more interested in joining from there. And that's what the Body of Knowledge is all about and what's in it. And I wanted to know if you had any questions? No questions. Not a single one. How many of you are, how, how many of you are now gonna just go look at it and see if there's anything there? You might wanna read one person.

Okay, thank you. God, if you follow Id pro on LinkedIn every Friday I have a feature Friday announcement of just like, okay, I'm gonna pick a Body of Knowledge article and I'm just gonna like write three things about it that I thought were interesting. So you may, if you're not already following Id pro, that would be a fun way for you to just see what's happening and to, you know, get the short, short version of whether an article might be of interest to you at this point. Remember that, you know, ID pro is just part of the larger ecosystem of what's happening in the identity space.

There's vendors involved, there's consultants involved, there's talks about how to increase this in the education sector. For those of you who are here this morning, we talked quite a bit about diversity in hiring, diversity in the workforce. One of my observations is a big challenge with the hiring process is if you don't have candidates to hire, hiring for diversity can be really, really challenging.

So we do have a lot of attention on how can we, how can we make identity a degree, something that you actually do intend to go through school for as opposed to the rest of us in this room who sort of just stumbled into it probably a little bit by accident. There are identity events. Id pro is at many of them. And if Id pro officially isn't, a lot of ID pro members are I, I would love to get the numbers from, for example, identi diverse or EIC. How many of the speakers are actually ID pro members. 'cause it's gonna be a fair number. It's great community.

And with that I am open for any questions you want about, wanna ask about the organization or about anything else for that matters. Or if you want to escape and have coffee, you can do that too.