Minutes From Meeting Today

[Dan Lyke]

On Sun, 25 Jun 2006 06:50:32 -0700, Martin Atkins wrote:
> I think a better goal would be to figure out a way that users can  
> securely migrate from one identity to another, since this comes up  
> in more cases than just SSL vs. cleartext HTTP. For example, if I'm  
> using a username.identityprovider.com URL and I want to migrate to  
> myowndomain.com, I currently have no way to prove that the two  
> identities are both me.

While it doesn't help those who are simply migrating existing systems  
over to "let me login from somewhere else", I think that we as  
application developers are going to have to drop the notion that a  
participant in our communities will have only one identity. For  
instance, in the community of weblogs that I read regularly, there's  
someone who has two identities, one male and business-like, one gender  
ambiguous and much more arty. Some of us know that these two  
identities refer to the same person, some don't.

It's absolutely the case that as I expand the software which runs my  
site to handle these multiple identities that I give users like that,  
or users who are migrating from one URL to another, a high level of  
control both about how those identities map to whatever presence they  
have on my site (ie: a user who knows about both identities might say  
"show me everything that X said" and get a different query than an  
anonymous user) and how they can add and delete references to external  
identities from whatever identities they've created on my system.

Dan