Harvard Law's Berkman Center for Internet & Society to Host Identity Mashup, Conference on Future of Open Digital Identity Management

19 June 2006

Key industry and government officials, technologists, legal scholars and nonprofit leaders will discuss the future role of digital identity management tools and their policy implications at "Identity Mashup," a conference hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society June 19 - 21 at Harvard Law School. As part of Identity Mashup, next generation identity cards -- called icards -- will be issued and demonstrated for the first time. Several companies and organizations, including Microsoft, IBM, Novell, BestBuy, and MyVirtual Model, will discuss and make public announcements about new products and services, and will demonstrate their next generation identity services.

"This conference has been a long time in the making, bringing together many of the key players in shaping an open and interoperable identity layer for the Web,: says John Clippinger, Berkman fellow and conference chair. "The conference is designed to encourage cross-disciplinary dialogue and to provide examples of open identity enabled services and applications."

Digital identity management is at the forefront of next generation Web services. A variety of parties -- governments, technology companies, health organizations, financial institutions, international agencies, and merchants -- are clamoring for identity systems to address a spectrum of issues from terrorism and child pornography to identity theft and spam. The proposals vary dramatically, from national ID cards with centralized data storage and a single universal identifier, to highly-distributed "user-centric" models with distributed data storage and authenticated anonymity. Central to the conference are questions regarding whether such tools and systems will further or inhibit privacy, civil liberties and new forms of online civic participation and commerce.

Conference panelists include: Kim Cameron, architect of Identity and Access, Microsoft; Ira Rubinstein, associate general counsel, Microsoft; Mark Greene, vice president, Global Financial Services, IBM; Anthony Nadalin, Chief Security Architect, IBM; Dr. Nataraj Nagaratnam, chief architect for Identity Management, IBM; Hal Abelson, professor of computer science, MIT, and W3C; Marc Rotenberg, executive director, EPIC; Doc Searls, editor, Linux Journal; Christine Varney, managing partner, Hogan and Hartson, and former FTC privacy commissioner; Jeremy Warren, U.S. Department of Justice; Esther Dyson, editor at large, CNet; Dick Hardt, CEO, Sxip; Louise Guay, CEO, My Virtual Model; Stefan Brands, CEO, Credentica; David Berlind, executive dditor, ZDNet; and Dale Olds, Novell.

For more information, including the full panelist list, conference schedule, and registration information, please visit: http://www.identitymash-up.org.

Microsoft Corporation and Best Buy are Identity Mashup conference sponsors. Identity Mashup is an outcome of Berkman's Identity Metasystem and the Law Project, which earlier this year announced with IBM, Novell, and Parity Communications, the release of the Higgins Project for open source software interoperable identity systems.

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About the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School: The Berkman Center is a research program founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/

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