Can the Open Pile Become Beautiful Again

Issue/Topic: Can the open pile become beautiful again

Monday – Session 1 - G

Conference: IIW10 May 17-19, 2009 this is the complete Complete Set of Notes

Convener: Johannes Earnst Notes-taker(s): Doc Searls, Johannes Ernst

A. Tags for the session - technology discussed/ideas considered:

B. Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:

The premise of the session was that the "Open Stack" of identity technologies (identifiers, discovery, authentication, information exchange ...) keeps growing like weeds. It becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of its (decentralized) evolution. This creates multiple problems:

1. potential adopters are intimidated by the sheer size of what they are expected to know

2. implementors are unable to implement all parts; there seems to be no example in the wild for implementations that support most of the member technologies

3. the usage model for the user is not becoming simpler, to put it mildly.

4. interoperability becomes more rather than less elusive.

There was general consensus in the room that this description of the state of the art is accurate. However, participants were unable to come up with an approach for how to "cut 80%" and make it simple, beautiful and cost-effective again.