[OpenID] The Contradiction of the Community Board

[SitG Admin]

>I think what this means in practice is that it's very important that the
>Foundation find some additional revenue sources that are not dependent
>on the satisfaction of board members. DeWitt and David have a proposal
>based on contributions and sponsorships, as David summarizes in his
>post. I don't claim to have any other specific ideas right now.

 From an April 25th message to Bill Washburn:

Re: member anonymity/privacy

I've been thinking for several weeks about a disassociation between 
aspects of a member's personal information, to let them sign up 
without connecting the dots in any publication. This would go further 
than simple privacy (associating membership with website*, but not 
name), in that someone might wish to have their website published 
*and* their name published, but the two not linked. This could make 
the head-count of names+websites+names&websites somewhat greater than 
the dues received, which could be confusing.

*Although, it's actually entirely reasonable that this occur, come to 
think of it - say, when an organization signs up, but there is no 
single person associated with that organization such that they intend 
to end the membership if that person leaves.

I shelved this idea previously because I couldn't think of any way to 
make it work *effectively* over the long run; by tracking the order 
in which names and websites appeared alone, comparing membership 
counts (by dues paid) with the number of normal/'private' members, 
and then eliminating from a list of each as some of those decided to 
be associated, it would be possible to associate the rest. But last 
night I thought of another way to approach this:

Let the names and websites appear at *different times*. That way, 
even a careful observer won't know whether a given name is that of a 
new member, or an old website.

For example, let's say you report dues paid every quarter. Between 
one and another, (after eliminating name+website members and their 
fees) new members double but fees only increase 50%. Half of these 
new members have only a name and the other half have only a website. 
But which if any of the names represent new members and which are 
just disassociated entries for old standalone websites?

And, of course, some people could wait longer than 1 quarter to add 
their name, and some might *never* add their name, leaving a small 
number of names to match up to a much larger set of websites.

I don't know about this one. It seems to me that, *despite* the 
varying delay, tracking down correlations between identities still 
might be possible - and even further elimination by learning more 
about members (and when they joined the Foundation) from their 
websites.

Closing with a thought on privacy and electronic records - the 
database might need to be structured carefully to prevent a 
carelessly formatted request from returning name AND website without 
consulting the privacy field. Maybe remove the name from electronic 
sources entirely, and note in your Privacy Policy that names have to 
be looked up in offline paper records (could be inconvenient, but - 
depending on how infrequently you actually *need* to know what names 
are - might not really matter).

-Shade

Postscript: Oh, last idea. It's a silly one, but what if the 
Foundation had $80 (base) for the privileges, anonymity forbidden 
(i.e., the user would have to pay for a website OR name, at a 
minimum, to associate with those privileges), and then $10 for a 
website and $10 for a name? Also, add a $10 "Supporter" status for 
those who just wanted to give their names or websites (but didn't 
have very much money and weren't interested in membership 
privileges), maybe $10 for either one, $20 for both; members could 
have their votes be associated with their website, and then, later 
on, when they'd decided whether they still wanted to have their name 
be separate or not, either pay the remaining $10 and associate their 
name with their website, or pay another $10 and show up as a separate 
Supporter.

If you let the Supporters have some sort of uniquely stylized OpenID 
logo with the URL of an openid.net page that shows all these 
different logos and what they indicate, you can combine "letting them 
advertise" with "letting them identify as Supporters", because the 
openid.net URL they're showing off *will* identify them (by their 
stylized logo) as Supporters.