[OpenID] OpenID Chance II

[Mike Johnson]

Bob- that's a very interesting story about the 'fact checking industry'..

Troy- likewise to you. :)

Bob again-

I think our interest is more strongly in the realm of signed assertions
regarding identity, credentials, and affiliations, instead of content. It
sounds interesting, but (outside of idealized situations that have little to
do with problems websites are trying to solve) the logistics of
transparently implementing such a system (let alone on a wiki) are
fearsome-- facts about content are messy, messy, messy. I'm not saying it's
not possible (and don't want to be a naysayer), but (similar to Johannes '
comment) I'd expect this to be an order of magnitude harder to implement
with OpenID than the problem of connecting real-world identities with online
personas.

Having said that, there might be some overlap with the tagging craze that's
currently sweeping the internet-- I suppose you could combine OpenID-signed
tags with a reputation system to get a better organizational
signal-to-noise.

I'll try to draft more thoughts on OpenID and Citizendium today or tomorrow.

Best,
Mike

On 2/2/07, Bob Wyman <bob at wyman.us> wrote:
>
> Ideally, once Citizendum establishes to their satisfaction that some
> individual properly claims the qualitative attribute "Holder of PHD from
> University X" or "Is professor at X", then Citizendum would create a signed
> claim recording their belief. That claim should then be useful to others who
> may wish to establish the same fact or to the individual involved who might
> wish, in the future, to say: "Citizendum has accepted my claim to have
> attribute X".
>
> In this specific space, (Certification of profession qualifications) there
> is a growing industry of companies that validate statements made on CVs and
> Resumes. Just a few months ago, I went through the process of having to
> present proofs of virtually every factual statement on my resume -- it was
> fairly painful given that a number of my ex-employers are either no longer
> in business or where merged with other entitites long ago.  Throughout the
> process,  I couldn't help  thinking how convenient it would have been if
> whenever I was hired by a company, granted a degree by an institution, etc.
> I was given a little pile of bits signed by the relevant institution that I
> could later use to "prove" any claims that I might make about my past.
>
> Today, the "fact checkers" work for employers or those wishing to verify
> claims, not for those who wish to establish claims. The result of course, is
> waste... Apply for 10 jobs and you might find that the same company is
> charging 10 times to certify the same fact... There is, I think, the
> opportunity to turn this around and create organizations that, for a fee,
> "certify" claims made by those wishing to establish them. So, I should be
> able to pay someone some amount of money to establish that I did, in fact,
> work for Digital from 1979 to 1991. Once I had that certification, I should
> be able to reuse it with any other organization that was willing to accept
> the reputation of the group that I paid to create the certification.
>
> Certification of facts is, I think, a business that will grow massively
> and in interesting ways once we have something like OpenID running...
>
> bob wyman
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openid.net/pipermail/openid-general/attachments/20070202/d37bb61f/attachment-0002.htm>