Case Study: Internet Identity Workshop

IIW 2006 WAS A SUPEREVENT Everyone in attendance was awe-struck by the IIW 2006 that just took place in Mountain View. It was incredible. With Doc Searls and Phil Windley navigating at the macro-level, the amazing Identity Woman Kaliya orchestrated an “unconference” that was one of the most effective events I’ve ever attended. It’s clear that creating synergy out of chaos is an art that these three have mastered, and participants floated in and out of sessions that self-organized around an ongoing three-day hallway conversation – the hallway actually being the main conference room and event! So we got to engage in all kinds of one-on-one (and few) conversations, meet new people, work out concerns and above all work on convergence. Many people told me they felt history was being made, and I did too. –  Kim Cameron Microsoft’s Chief Identity Architect.

TLDR:

Unconference.net owner Kaliya Young co-founded the Internet Identity Workshop over twenty years ago. Today it is the leading innovation forum for digital identity globally. The first generation of protocols it cultivated (among them OpenID and OAuth) are used billions of times a day by people around the world. The second generation of protocols (among them Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials) are just beginning to get widespread adoption by governments in projects like the EU Digital Identity Wallet, MOSIP, in countries like Bhutan and Taiwan and states like California.

Client:

The challenge:

  • The original challenge for the first IIW in 2005 was what to do after hearing a full day of presentations about different user-centric identity approaches. Participants wanted to take action, not just learn.
  • After the first event we were fostering a community of technologists working on technologies that put people at the center of their own digital representation of self. For the next event and all subsequent ones the challenge was how do you decide who should speak? 

The solution:

  • After the first full day of 7 presentations by the various working groups we stayed for a second day and used Open Space Technology to support the attendees co-creating their own agenda live. 
  • Six months later the second Internet Identity Workshop had a ½ day of presentations before two days of attendee-led sessions using Open Space Technology 
  • After 4 years we dropped the ½ day of presentations and just do three days of Open Space Technology where those who attend co-create the agenda together. 
  • We host three meals a day for attendees to ensure important conversations happen outside of sessions.

Why they chose us: 

  • Kaliya Young, owner of Unconference.net, is one of the three founders of IIW. 
  • Early on, Doc Searls, one of my co-founders, said this about IIW: The event, an unconference, was one of the best conferences, prefix or no, that I’ve ever been to, much less been part of.

The outcomes:

  • The conversations during the open space technology on the 2nd day of the first IIW lead to the formation of a collaboration called YADIS which subsequently became the OpenID protocols and lead to the formation of the OpenID Foundation
  • Conversations between MySpace and Flickr and other platforms gathered at IIW led to the creation of the OAuth protocols to prevent the password sharing anit-pattern from taking hold across the internet.  
  • OpenID and OAuth are widely deployed across the internet and used billions of times a day by people around the world. 
  • In 2015 blockchains were coming into their own in the tech world and this architecture inspired folks working on user-centric identity to consider how they could be applied. This work eventually led to the development of two key innovative technologies Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials both now standardized at the World Wide Web Consortium. 
  • Many organizations were founded as a result of the work coming out of IIW including the OpenID Foundation, Trust over IP Foundation, Decentralized Identity Foundation, Human Colossus Foundation, and MyData Global.  
  • IIW has in recent years expanded to do regional events with partners in Europe, Asia and Africa. 
  • IIW and its regional events now serve as global innovation forums in digital identity and particularly technologies that empower people to be a the center of how they can manage the digital representation of themselves.