Future Salon

Happy Birthday Sailor

The Sailor Boy, as he calls himself, celebrated his 80th birthday with his daughters, grandchildren and his friends last Saturday.

To live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy. [Essence of First Things First] If there is one person that has done it all, then it is Doug Engelbart.

He told the story again last Saturday at age 25, after he had proposed to his future wife he formulated a principle for his professional life:

Let me design a professional goal which will maximize the contribution my career can have to mankind!

Weeks later his lifetime goal emerged:

As much as possible, to boost mankind's collective capability for coping with complex, urgent problems.

This goal was his guiding light throughout his career, which enabled him to see things beyond the horizon, to see capabilities that are beyond the reach for you.

Videos from Doug's famous demo from 1968 were shown at the party and details revealed that I haven't heard before.

There was no Ethernet back in the 60s, so they created a wireless link to send the data and video streams from the Palo Alto offices to the conference in San Francisco with a couple of trucks on Skyline as repeaters creating as far as I know the first mobile network. Absolutely amazing.

Happy Birthday Sailor Boy. We are so glad to have you in our midst and don't feel like a failure [You reiterated that on Saturday. Just because not everything that you envisioned has come through yet] there are people like Eugene from Blue Oxen or the group at Processing Engelbart that are picking up the pieces and keeping your dream alive.

You will forever be our inspiration on the way to a world that works for all of us.

As the Future Salon's little part to further carry your ideas and work out to the world, finally the video of your Future Salon presentation is available at the Internet Archive. [Fast forward if you can to 13:45 or so, this is where Doug's talk starts.]

Thank you Doug for all that you have done for us.

Pictures and Audio of Identity Future Salon

Mike Rowehl has posted a couple of pictures from last Friday's Identity Future Salon on Flickr using the FutureSalon Tag.

Even more impressive is, that Niall Kennedy has his sound recordings of the event already online.  To the right you can see Eric Sachs from Google in action and Niall's microphone recording him with his Apple Powerbook.

What you are not getting from his cut is the round of introduction of the audience and the quirky things that they have found online about themselves or the story about the identity theft from a lawyer. To experience that, you have to come yourself :-)

When I saw the RSVP list for the event, there were about 25 people on it and I thought, that is going to be a nice intimate gathering. Love it. But then at least twice as many showed up and we packed the Southern Cross Room at SAP again. Great interaction and interesting insights from the speakers as well as from the audience.

Interesting side note: Neither Fen nor Jeff the people working the closest with identity systems are using a Fastrack or a Safeway Club Card. [If you read this Slashdot story you may understand why.]

This Friday 28th: Who are you? Future Salon

Just a quick reminder. This Friday the 28th of January Future Salon about Identity. Please don't forget to RSVP so we can calculate food and drinks by sending an email to mona dot bhardwaj at sap dot com or to me.

New study from the Better Business Bureau comes to a for me surprising result:

The study maintains that ID fraud is not worsening, that most identities are stolen by low-tech methods, and that much of the theft is committed by a friend, family member or someone else known by the victim.

That's good news, but Identity fraught is only a very small part of the whole picture and we have some great minds to shed some lights on it. Details in my last post.

The short of it:

Future Salon about Identity with presenters from Google, Liberty Alliance and ID Commons. Friday 28th of January 6-7pm networking with light refreshments proudly sponsored by SAP. From 7-9+pm presentations and panel discussion. SAP Labs North America, Building D, Room Southern Cross, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94304 [map]

Guard Your Identity

ACLU has an excellent video clip out that beautifully crystallizes what is at stake with you and your Identity.

So you got "Dealing with Depression" out of the library or bought it from Amazon. How interesting.

Good motivation for you to come to this Friday's Future Salon: Who am I? Your identity online and beyond. (Details below)

Reading about it I also stumbled over Kim Cameron's Identity Weblog. He is in the middle of a great discussion about the Laws of Identity,which he says people who work on or with identity systems need to obey. He just introduced The Sixth Law. Let's see if our speakers live up to his bar.

It would be interesting to have him this Friday too, but no we are not changing the format or moving the event again. :-)

We have three presenters:

Google will be represented by Eric Sachs

Mr. Sachs is currently a product manager at Google in the Consumer Web team. He is responsible for the Google Account common login system and managed the orkut.com service during its first six months of operation. Mr. Sachs was previously the CTO and co-founder of Interliant which provides hosted computer outsourcing services. Interliant grew to 200 employees and $20M in revenue before being acquired in 1999 by a holding entity that took the Interliant name and went public in July of that year. During his time at Interliant, he co-developed software with both IBM/Lotus and Microsoft. Eric Sachs graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in computer science and managerial studies from Rice University

PRESENTATION Have you ever Google'd an interview candidate, or date, or other person you were going to meet? Are you embarrassed that the top Google search for you shows a dance award you won in college? Or do you find it is actually hard to do Google searches about people?

We will discuss what things people are doing today to try to define their "digital identity" in Google searches through Blogs, social networks, and other techniques. We will also discuss why those are only starting points, and the additional challenges that exist to solve this problem, especially around security of that information.

Liberty Alliance will be represented by Jeff Hodges:

Jeff Hodges is a protocol architect who recently joined NeuStar.biz, a neutral, trusted 3d party provider of operational support services to the telecom industry. He'd spent the prior nearly three years at Sun Microsystems on its Project Liberty team, where he co-authored several of the Liberty Alliance protocol specifications. Prior to Sun, he was a Principal Engineer at Oblix where he contributed to OASIS's Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) effort and consulted with Oblix's product team. Prior to Oblix he was in the Networking Systems department at Stanford University where he deployed Stanford's first LDAP-based directory service and contributed to the LDAPv3 effort in the IETF.

Presentation: Identity is a fundamental notion underlying, and enabling, interactions between people. Whether interacting as customers, suppliers, partners, employees, citizens, officials, or anonymous passerbys -- we, and the tools we wield, need to be able to make and understand statements such as: "hi, 'I' am here", "send 'that' to 'them'", "'I' request a copy of 'that' from 'you'". This brief talk summarizes the foregoing and illustrates the primary use cases addressed by the open, freely-available Liberty Alliance specifications for "identity federation" and "identity-enabled web services".

Fen Labalme who is one of the key developers working on the Identity Commons code will introduce his view on online identity.

Fen Labalme has been working on privacy-enh anced personalization systems since creating News``Peek, the first personalized information system, in 1979 at the then-nascent MIT Media Lab. As part of his research into personalized information, he coined the term [http://broadcatch.com/definition.shtml broadcatch] to describe a suite of "many-to-one" technologies designed to provide information the way people really want it: timely, trusted, and on target. Fen co-authored [http://journal.planetwork.net/article.php?lab=reed0704 The Social Web: Creating An Open Social Network with XDI] and is the primary author of the seminal [http://www.broadcatch.com/lumeria/paper1/index.shtml An Infomediary Approach to the Privacy Problem] and [http://www.openprivacy.org/papers/200103-white.html Enhancing the Internet with Reputations] white papers. He is currently CTO of Identity Commons and 2idi, creators of the first i-broker (released as open source code). Fen can be reached via his i-name enabled contact gateway at http://public.xdi.org/=Fen.Labalme

Presentation: Who has control over your online identity could become the most important issue facing people using any network in the near future. It is my strong belief that the right answer to that question is "you." Identity Commons and 2idi have teamed up to create a new form of "social technology" necessary for trusted electronic communications. I-names (OASIS standards-based, persistent, portable and private identifiers) form the core of this system and community-based social contracts provide the fabric for reputation management; together they enable new forms of membership management, social networking and permissions-based marketing. This talk will touch on these aspects, as well as the unique, grassroots, evolutionary approach we are taking to ensure that what we build is what you want.

This is quite a handful.

Friday 28th of January 6-7pm networking with light refreshments proudly sponsored by SAP. From 7-9+pm presentations and panel discussion. SAP Labs North America, Building D, Room Southern Cross, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94304 [map]

Improve your commute by sharing it with a fellow Futurist. Check the Ride Board for opportunities.

As always free and open to the public. Spread the word. To be able to calculate food and drinks please RSVP if you are coming by sending an email to mona dot bhardwaj at sap dot com or to me.

See you all there.

Alternative Energy Solutions for Supporting Human and Other Forms of Life

Our December accidential camaraman D.J. Cline just called. He was at the door and wondering whether there is a Future Salon tonight. No it is next Friday the 28th: Future Salon about Online Identity.

But you can get your dose of Futurism this Sunday at the Cybersalon in Berkeley run by Sylvia Paull and Jeff Ubois:

Alternative Energy Solutions for Supporting Human and Other Forms of Life

It is a great and very important theme. It will be interesting to hear what they have to say about Peak Oil, which paints a quite dark scenario for the future, but may be Spray-On Solar-Power Cells come to the rescue as linked to by Sam Hahn.

Check it out.

Alternative Energy Solutions for Supporting Human and Other Forms of Life

6-8 p.m., Sunday, January 23

Hillside Club, 2268 Cedar St.

Just around the millennial corner are viable solutions for reducing our reliance on traditional energy sources, such as oil, coal, and gas. Making human life coexistent with that of our planet's are three remarkable individuals:

Jay Harman, naturalist, inventor, and founder of PAX Scientific, has invented technologies for designing machines, such as drills, rotors, and fans, that optimize energy use. Harman, whose company is based in San Rafael and whose board of directors includes Amory Lovins and Paul Hawken, hails from Australia, where he designed several award-winning boats and founded ERG, a leading technology company.

John Galloway is a senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, which is concerned about the impact of global warming on ecosystems and animals on our planet.

Brian McConnell, author of "Hacking Your Way Off The Utility Grid" and "Renewable Energy: the Next Opportunity for Silicon Valley," lives in a house that is literally and figuratively off the energy grid. He'll tell us how he did it.

Doors open at 6:00 and a $10 donation is requested for light refreshments. The panel discussion starts at 7:00 p.m and we encourage everyone to participate. The Cybersalon presents a monthly panel focused on technology and culture and is hosted by Sylvia Paull and Jeff Ubois.

Douple Your Chances to Die: Drive an SUV

It's not that you will get hit by an Earth First activist for driving an SUV (Although it would be good if reason would hit SUV drivers soon :-)

No, 'upgrade' from a Jetta/Golf to a Toyota 4Runner and your chances of dying in an an accident just doubled from 37 per million Jettas to 94 per million 4Runners. Oh, and if you love your child, please get a minivan for a third of the 4Runner fatalities only 31 per million Chrysler Town & Country.

Don't believe me, then read Big and Bad last year's excellent New Yorker Article by Malcolm Gladwell. It's a real eye opener regarding building and buying for perceived safety versus real safety and why we fall for it.

Malcolm just brought out a new book Blink. The power of thinking without thinking. Currently on top of Technorati's book list. Salon has a review. There is also the showdown between him and the Wisdom of Crowds author James Surowiecki in Slate [via Evelyn].

Malcolm is on tour in the Bay Area right now. Check it out. I think I will try the lunch Stanford Bookstore session on Wednesday, which is quite close to SAP. See you there.

Future Salon: Who am I? Moved to Friday 28th

Considering how much your online ID is shaped by Google, I wanted to hear their part of the story to "Who am I online" too.

Fen and Paul loved the idea, the problem was only that next Friday is the annual Google Ski Weekend, so no one around to answer our questions.

This is why we moved it by a week to Friday the 28th.

Unfortunately Paul Madsen who is from the East Coast will not be here, but he found a great person to take his place. Jeff Hodges from Neustar who edits a number of the technical specs and has been active in the Liberty Alliance (2) from the start. Here a link to a LIBERTY ALLIANCE PROJECT WHITE PAPER on which Paul was the lead editor.

Fen Labalme who is one of the key developers working on the Identity Commons code will introduce his view on online identity and why it is important for you to own your own.

Google will be represented by Eric Sachs who is currently a product manager in the Consumer Web team. He is responsible for the Google Account common login system and managed the orkut.com service during its first six months of operation. (Interesting side note: It was not easy to find a page about Eric on Google and the one I found is over 2 years old :-)

Friday 28th of January 6-7pm networking with light refreshments proudly sponsored by SAP. From 7-9+pm presentations and panel discussion. SAP Labs North America, Building D, Room Southern Cross, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94304 [map]

Improve your commute by sharing it with a fellow Futurist. Check the Ride Board for opportunities.

As always free and open to the public. More details to come soon. Spread the word. 

Pick up the Pieces

As it is often he case, once I announce a Future Salon topic, things happen in that area (or is it only that we take a closer look?): Now that eBay has dropped support for Microsoft's Passport their proprietary identity system is Liberty Alliance or Identity Commons ready to pick up the pieces?

Find out at the next Salon about the Future of your Online Identity with Paul Madsen from the Liberty Alliance and Fen Labalme form Identity Commons.

Future Salon: Who am I?

Happy New Year to all you Future Saloners. The beginning of a year is always a good time to hold still and ask oneself: "Who am I?" In our case "Who am I online?"

As more and more of your life is captured and lived online, more and more of your professional as well as personal reputation will be derived from your online identity.

This is only a very small portion of online identity management, but reason enough to check into the current status and where this is going.

So far my knowledge of this area is very limited and this is why I invited two experts and am happy to report that they accepted the invitation to fill us in:

Paul Madsen who is vice chair of the technology chair of the Liberty Alliance (2). He was the primary author of the LIBERTY ALLIANCE PROJECT WHITE PAPER.

Fen Labalme who is one of the key developers working on the Identity Commons code will introduce his view on online identity and why it is important for you to own your own.

Friday 21st of January 6-7 networking with light refreshments proudlu sponsored by SAP. From 7-9+pm presentations and panel discussion. SAP Labs North America, Building D, Room Southern Cross, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94304 [map]

Update: Forgot to link to our Ride Board. Improve your commute by sharing it with a fellow Futurist.

As always free and open to the public. More details to come soon. Spread the word.