Identity in Information Networking

Information networking has been the topic of some of my recent posts and is also at the heart of efforts like the PSIRP project, which I am happy to be part of. But it has also been the centre of my attention within my work with the Communications Futures Program (CFP) @ MIT. Being active in CFP since 2004, I have been co-chairing the Privacy & Security working group in CFP since the mid of 2007 together with Karen Sollins from MIT.

The WG has been moving its focus to information networking since the end of last year. The early work on tussle networking began in CFP, and the PrivSec WG intended to shed an interesting light on the question of identity in an increasingly information-centric Internet, up to the point of asking how identity frameworks could look like if we questioned some of the fundamentals of today’s Internet. This line of thought is written down in the CFP whitepaper in Identity in Information Networking.

Since the publication of the whitepaper, the WG has been working actively on increasing our understanding, probably unearthening more questions than finding answers. Areas like context awareness, metadata, information accountability and others have been found providing interesting angles on the relevant issues on identity in an information-centric world. We also included first economic views on this issue, relying on previous work done in the Value Chain Dynamics WG, which I co-chaired up until end of 2006.

This all led us to organize a workshop on this issue, taking place at MIT on October 21st/22nd. The event is intended to be a real workshop, hence debate and discussion is our primary goal by bringing in different angles through the different experts we managed to convince to come to our gathering. The workshop is invitation only so that I cannot call for participation to a wider audience. But I am confident that we will have an interesting discussion with hopefully interesting results and steps forward. And it is likely that you will see some of this on this blog in the future.