Posted 8:26 PM (2) comments

I only know him by reputation...

Phil Windley has a post today about the Principles of Reputation - and it's as succinct a discussion of that elusive topic as I've seen yet. It came out of a discussion at the Open Space day associated with the Identity Mashup at Berkman. I don't agree with all of the principles as stated, but it is a very good beginning.

As I envision reputation, though, I believe it to be a unique quality of each persona. That is, no single persona could have more than one reputation. So each digital context of your identity would develop both it's own persona and it's own reputation. That reputation belongs to you, but it's neither created nor maintained by you. That does mean, of course, that you need to always be aware of your reputation to guard against it becomming an adverse attribute for your persona.

Once we've been able to get a grip on what reputation is, perhaps then we can move on to how to leverage that reputation within identity transactions.

Posted 10:03 AM (0) comments

The more the merrier

Jim Yang had an itch. He was designing an identity project for a large Texas grocery chain and realized it could significantly benefit from a virtual directory. But there was no money in the project to license a commercial virtual directory and there was no free/open source directory available. So he rolled his own. Penrose, the open source virtual directory, has now been released in version 1.0.

It's not as polished as those from Radiant Logic, MaXware, Oracle or SymLabs, but the price is certainly right and it should allow someone to at least model a project and demonstrate its eventual solution. With a little help from the user community it could even be able to hold its own as part of the open source identity suite.