The Augmented Social Network

The Augmented Social Network: Building identity and trust into the next-generation Internet by Ken Jordan, Jan Hauser, and Steven Foster
Could the next generation of online communications strengthen civil society by better connecting people to others with whom they share affinities, so they can more effectively exchange information and self-organize? Could such a system help to revitalize democracy in the 21st century? When networked personal computing was first developed, engineers concentrated on extending creativity among individuals and enhancing collaboration between a few. They did not much consider what social interaction among millions of Internet users would actually entail. It was thought that the Net’s technical architecture need not address the issues of "personal identity" and "trust," since those matters tended to take care of themselves.

This paper proposes the creation of an Augmented Social Network (ASN) that would build identity and trust into the architecture of the Internet, in the public interest, in order to facilitate introductions between people who share affinities or complementary capabilities across social networks. The ASN has three main objectives: 1) To create an Internet-wide system that enables more efficient and effective knowledge sharing between people across institutional, geographic, and social boundaries; 2) To establish a form of persistent online identity that supports the public commons and the values of civil society; and, 3) To enhance the ability of citizens to form relationships and self-organize around shared interests in communities of practice in order to better engage in the process of democratic governance. In effect, the ASN proposes a form of "online citizenship" for the Information Age.

The ASN is not a piece of software or a Web site. Rather, it is a model for a next-generation online community that could be implemented in a number of ways, using technology that largely exists today. It is a system that would enhance the power of social networks by using interactive digital media to exploit the transitive nature of trust through the principle of six degrees of connection. As a result, people will be able to inform themselves and self-organize more effectively — in non-hierarchical, rhizomatic social formations — leading to more opportunities for engaged citizenship. Part 1 of the paper discusses the concepts behind the ASN, why it is important to pursue such a project today, and the dangers civil society faces if it is not pursued. Part 2 describes a technical architecture for the protocols and software that would support a system of recommendations through trusted third parties across the Internet as a whole. Part 3 offers recommendations for first steps toward achieving the ASN.

The ASN weaves together four distinct technical areas into components of an interdependent system. The four main elements of the ASN are: Persistent online identity; interoperability between communities; brokered relationships; and, public interest matching technologies. Each of these is discussed in a separate section in detail.

The issue of persistent online identity is examined first through a contrast between the needs of civil society and current initiatives in the commercial sector, the Liberty Alliance Project and Microsoft’s .Net identity system, named Passport. The ASN calls for a public interest approach to online identity that enables individuals to express their interests outside contexts determined by commerce. This approach would include a digital profile that has an "affinity reference" that would facilitate connections to trusted third parties.

The section on interoperability between online communities starts with a discussion of Reed’s Law, which shows how the value of social networks grows exponentially through interconnectivity. We then discuss how the ASN would apply Reed’s Law to online communities of practice in new ways, through the creation of interoperability protocols that will enable individuals to cross more easily between social networks. The ASN would create strategically placed "doors" between online community infrastructures, which today act like "walled castles." Also discussed are the module software applications necessary to extend the functionality of online community infrastructures so they can support ASN activity.

The section on brokered relationships begins by discussing the importance of brokering introductions between people using the ASN, and describes the "introduction protocols" that would facilitate this process. While many ASN introductions would be automated, others of a more sensitive nature will require specialized brokering services that provide customized introductions, appropriate to narrowly defined circumstances. These are discussed, as well as current brokering systems that are developing relevant technology.

The section on public interest matching technologies explains why it is crucial for the civil society sector to participate in the creation of online ontologies and taxonomies that are now shaping the semantic structure of the Internet. Also discussed are the ways that matching technologies enhance online communities, and how the ASN would develop protocols that enable interoperability between online ontological frameworks. The latter would enrich knowledge sharing between social networks by allowing distinct communities to compare "knowledge maps," and easily access diverse viewpoints.

The ASN could be achieved in an incremental manner, with software and protocols developed among a relatively small group of participants, and gradually adopted by larger online community systems as they see fit. The ASN would be built on open standards, shepherded by a not-for-profit initiative that coordinates efforts in the technical areas described above. Aspects of the implementation could be undertaken by for-profit companies that respect these open standards, just as companies today profit from providing e-mail or Web pages. But to insure that the ASN meets its public interest objectives, participating organizations would have to agree to abide by the ASN’s principles of implementation. [Update: Since this paper was first circulated in draft form, in June 2003, an organization has been established to help bring the ASN into existence. For more information about this not-for-profit project, the Initiative for an Augmented Social Network (IFASN), please visit http://asn.planetwork.net.]

Contents

Part 1: The future of online identity and trust
The Augmented Social Network
The ASN approach: Designing an Internet-wide system of trust
The ASN user experience
Part 2: ASN technical components
ASN architecture
Persistent identity
Enhancements to online community infrastructures
Public interest matching technologies
Brokering services
Part 3: Strategies for implementation
Software development in the public interest
Principles for implementation
Recommendations

Part 1: The future of online identity and trust

The Augmented Social Network

The Internet is a communications platform made from software. This distinguishes it from all previous media, which were determined by the physical characteristics of their materials. Software, by its very nature, is programmable — which means that the Internet is far more malleable than its predecessors such as the telegraph, the telephone, print, and film. To a significant extent, software can do what we ask of it. It can enable the behaviors we demand from it, as long as we are able to write the necessary code, and that code can be supported by the appropriate hardware.

Online community tools have proven to be extremely effective at connecting people to one another, and helping them to share information. But shouldn’t we ask: Can these tools be extended to make them even more powerful, in order to further enhance public discourse? Could they be improved to more effectively advance the values of engaged citizenship and democracy? Could the Internet be better at helping us to:

Find others with whom we share affinities?

Share relevant information and media with one another?

Self-organize, and more easily form alliances to engage constructively with our neighbors, our fellow citizens, and our representatives in government?

In recent decades, globalization has transformed traditional power relationships in society by eroding geographic borders, challenging the sovereignty of the nation-state, and centralizing control of mass media in increasingly few hands. Most of these changes have been driven by commercial interests, with little consideration given to their effect on democracy. The democratic institutions we have were not conceived to work under such conditions, and are straining under new pressures. There is a growing risk that citizens will become alienated from the process of democratic governance, and feel ill equipped to challenge global elites and corporate interests in areas such as the environment, poverty, health, or sustainable development. Might a "next generation Internet" help to reinvigorate democracy by providing a platform that makes it easier for citizens to inform themselves about public policy debates, self-organize, and participate in the process of governance?

Walls have been going up on the Internet. The openness that characterizes the Net is under attack on several fronts. Expansive intellectual property laws, narrowly conceived commercial interests, and governments threatened by digital media’s potential to challenge traditional power centers — each threatens to stifle the Internet’s unique ability to connect people and ideas in unprecedented ways. Lawrence Lessig has written insightfully about protecting the Internet as a public commons, a resource shared by all that encourages productive collaboration among its users. Lessig offers a vision of the Internet where walls are kept to a minimum, so that innovative behavior has room to flourish. It is a vision that properly values collaboration, and appreciates the Internet’s ability to enable cooperation in ways never before possible.

This paper offers a parallel vision, that of a "next generation" online community that would strengthen the collaborative nature of the Internet, enhancing its ability to act as a public commons that involves citizens in civil society. As digital media mature, becoming an increasingly ubiquitous part of 21st century life, they have the potential to be even better at helping people share ideas and organize projects. Of course, as Lessig and others have pointed out, there are many reasons to fear that this potential will not be realized, that short-sighted forces in business and government are conspiring to cripple the Internet, just as the technology is beginning to bloom. For that reason, now is the time to present transformative visions of the Internet, to offer models that suggest how digital media can give birth to networks of trusted association. The "next generation" of online community should be a manifestation of flourishing, innovative democracy that encourages the active participation of its citizenry. Asking for any less would be a betrayal of our highest ideals.

What should online "citizenship" mean in a era of 24/7 connectivity to a ubiquitous information infrastructure? In this new world, you will have an online identity that remains constant, allowing for continuity between your experiences in separate online environments. As in real life, when you go from one virtual social milieu to another your identity will acquire a history. But because this will take place in a digital realm, designed by code and made of data, information will be attached to your identity in ways we are only now beginning to appreciate. Who decides what that capability will be, and most important, whether it contributes or not to civil society? What will your "persistent identity" online say about you, and what shouldn’t it say?

In this paper, we make a case for a form of persistent identity that serves civil society. Well conceived, and done in the public interest, persistent identity could enhance interpersonal relationships and social organizing just as powerfully as the PC has extended personal creativity. Much has been written recently about the power of social networks, and the famed "six degrees of separation." Suppose you could go online and make relevant connections with others from whom you are separated by one, two, or three degrees? Suppose that while working on a solar energy project in California, you could use such a system to find an engineer in Shanghai whose experience is directly relevant to your project? Could the Internet be used to establish networks of trust that cross traditional borders? Can the Internet be better at supporting the ability of citizens to self-organize and participate in civil society?

In 1962, the visionary engineer Douglas Engelbart first proposed the idea of a networked personal computer, a machine that would, as he described it, "augment human intellect." He understood that digital technology could enhance the ability of the mind to shape and develop concepts, as well as invite new forms of collaboration. The device that he and his colleagues at the Stanford Research Institute designed, dubbed the oNLine System (NLS), deliberately expanded on the innate human tendency toward creativity, and aimed to support creativity with the appropriate set of digital tools. The PCs we all use today are the fruits of their effort.

In this paper, we take a similar approach to enhancing person-to-person interaction and group formation through the use of digital communications tools. Just as Engelbart set for his team the goal of "augmenting human intellect," we propose an initiative that will lead to an "Augmented Social Network" (ASN). And just as Engelbart’s NLS was guided by the firm belief that people would use these digital tools to, as he put it, "solve the world’s problems" [1] (his was a strongly utopian vision), the ASN is designed to support and expand on the fundamental values of an informed and engaged citizenship at the heart of a democratic society. The ASN is not a piece of software or a Web site; it is not a self-contained application. Rather, it is a model for a "next generation" online community that could be implemented in a variety of ways. The overall objectives are more important than the specific implementation choices (though we do describe an implementation architecture, to show that the ASN is indeed achievable). Unlike Engelbart’s NLS, the ASN will not require a decade of intensive R&D at a cutting edge computer science laboratory, because the technology necessary for the ASN already exists, or is being developed. No engineering breakthrough is required. Rather, the challenge facing the ASN is organizational and political, not technological.

The ASN begins with the belief that the contribution to civil society that online community is already making can be dramatically expanded. This premise led us to consider a different way to look at online interpersonal communication. We began by asking: How could new software and standards best support Internet-facilitated, self-propagating, self-organizing communities that are based on trust? This question is particularly relevant in light of recent research into the nature of social networks, and way they encourage collaboration and innovation. Self-organizing groups that come together for reasons other than market forces are increasingly appreciated for their central role in civil society. Could the Internet be improved to help form groups that act in the public interest? Needless to say, this approach differs in crucial ways from the one now being pursued by the commercial sector.

In our lives, each of us inhabits a wide range of distinct, independent social networks. As we move between them, we bring with us our unique interests, our experience, knowledge, and relationships. Each time we go from one social network to another we do not need to restate who we are, what our interests are, or who we know. And we certainly don’t leave these aspects of ourselves behind as we cross from one social milieu to the next.

Why is it then, as we go from one online community to another, that our experiences within them are so segregated?

The fact is, given the strengths of computer technology, online communications ought to produce the exact opposite effect. The computer’s great power is its ability to store, sort, and distribute information. This information could include aspects of ourselves, for example: what we’re interested in, who we know, who we trust. Of course, this information could never be comprehensive — nor should it be, even if it were possible.

But in narrow, tactical areas, such as those relating to our work, or to issues we deeply care about (like rainforests, hunger, or AIDs), information of this kind, within an appropriate system, could be extremely useful in helping us to make relevant connections with others as we go from one online community to the next. (Of course, we would need to feel secure that this information is kept private, and would not be exploited against our wishes for commercial or other purposes.)

If we are to accept Marshall McLuhan’s assertion "the medium is the message," then the software and systems we choose for our communications carry with them, in subtle ways, the values we care to achieve as a society. Before the Internet, we never had the opportunity to engineer forms of social interchange as we do today. In fact, each choice we make about our digital, networked communications infrastructure carries with it political significance — because it determines how we can connect with one another, and how we might be prevented from connecting. For this reason, it is a concern that the design of the technical infrastructure underlying online communication is increasingly determined by for-profit entities that seek to monetize every aspect of our discourse, and that see communications between people largely as a catalyst for consumer transactions.

Conversely, if we bring a vision of a lively, informed, engaged citizenry to our expectations for online communications, it leads us to ask: What enhancements to the current technical architecture could truly benefit the public interest? If we start with the notion that a person online is a citizen, rather than a consumer, we then wonder: What might be done to improve our online communication tools to make people more effective citizens?

The ASN has three main objectives:

To create an Internet-wide system that enables more efficient and effective knowledge sharing between people across institutional, geographic, and social boundaries.

To establish a form of persistent online identity that supports the public commons and the values of civil society.

To enhance the ability of citizens to form relationships and self-organize around shared interests in communities of practice in order to better engage in the process of democratic governance.

In this paper we present a model for a next generation online community that can achieve these goals. It is, certainly, an ambitious program. But as we will show, the primary challenges are not technical. Rather, much of the core technology necessary to create the ASN already exists. The question is whether the will and determination can be marshaled to apply tools that currently exist, or that are now emerging, to better serve civil society.

At the same time, we have to consider what will likely happen if a public interest initiative to create the ASN does not take place. Among many of the "digerati" there is a tenacious belief that the Internet will inevitably reach its full potential as an open, democratic public space. Even the dot com crash has done little to challenge the assumption that as the technology keeps evolving, the public interest will somehow be served (as long as governments are willing to police privacy abuses). This attitude ignores the fact that, at key crossroads, choices between competing technical implementations must be made, and that different choices will favor different constituencies. Though public interest and commercial interests have often been aligned during the build out of the Internet infrastructure, this will not always be the case. In fact, divisions between the public good and the business agenda are now multiplying.

Commercial interests are now driving the Internet in a direction that risks leaving important potentials untapped. As mentioned above, legal obstacles, such as intellectual property statues written in another era, threaten to suppress an extraordinary flowering of creativity and information sharing that the Internet already makes possible. The enthusiastic privatization of Internet infrastructure is also an area of concern, potentially leading to a carving up of the Internet into discrete, walled domains, with fees charged at borders. In fact, the cable industry has already begun to establish classifications for different kinds of services, chipping away at the Net’s open architecture. Another concern has to do with the issue of online identity management. Two business-based initiatives — the Passport initiative that is part of Microsoft’s .Net architecture and the Liberty Alliance — are deliberate efforts to create de-facto standards for personal identity online. Unfortunately, these are primarily focused on how you behave as a consumer, rather than as an independent citizen apart from the commercial arena; their intent is to privatize this information, and then manage it in a way that gives them a share of every financial transaction you make. Current trends are pushing the Internet to become a closed, controlled, commercial space that most resembles a shopping mall. Certainly these initiatives show good business sense, but are they sound public policy?

While the vision is ambitious, the resources needed to achieve the ASN are not extraordinary. What we propose here is a deliberate effort to create software in the public interest — a not-for-profit approach to develop software, protocols, and technical infrastructure to benefit civil society. It is notable that, so many years into the "Information Revolution," there has yet to emerge a meaningful support system for this kind of work. We make a case for it here.

The ASN approach: Designing an Internet-wide system of trust

Online person-to-person communication is barely a generation old; only in the last decade or so has it become a true mass medium. Yet the tools most of us use to communicate online, and our expectations of what those tools might enable us to do, have changed little since the first computer-to-computer messages were sent in the 1960s. E-mail, bulletin boards, online chat, and file sharing have long formed the stable core of the interpersonal interaction enabled by computers wired to pass information freely between one another. It is worth recalling that these basic building blocks of online communications were the product of publicly or university funded initiatives; they were not justified by business plans, marketplace analysis, or a projected return on investment.

At the time, engineers concentrated on extending creativity among individuals and enhancing collaboration between a few. While they firmly believed that one day networked personal computers would be used by millions, they didn’t much consider what social interaction among millions of Internet users would actually entail. Instead, there was the (perhaps naïve) belief that the prevailing ethic of the Internet of that time, based on trust and a commitment to serving the community, was intrinsic to Net culture, and would remain with it as the system grew. It was thought that the Net’s technical architecture need not address issues like "identity" or "trust," since those matters tended to take care of themselves.

At first, the social network that emerged from the use of these tools was relatively small. Early users of the Internet could, with some assurance, feel they shared affinities with others they met online. The small size of the community, and the intensity of connections between those who participated, created an environment in which you were encouraged to act responsibly in order to protect your personal reputation. As John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, put it, "Back then, we knew who everybody was. We knew who to trust" [2]. But as the online social network grew from a few hundred to the many millions — becoming, effectively, many different, overlapping social networks — the ability to identify affinities and establish trust through the Net withered.

Current trends in online community

Though many of us now take this confused situation for granted, it is, on consideration, a surprising turn of events. Digital technology is widely appreciated for its ability to classify and sort complex information, making knowledge available in increasingly useful ways. Why not apply this capability to support the way people interact in large groups? This discrepancy has been noted by the commercial software industry, and in recent years it began to respond. We are now on the threshold of a new wave of software and standards that could revolutionize the way information is shared and people interact with one another online. New powerful tools — such as knowledge management systems, online identity programs, digital media distribution, and ubiquitous computing across platforms and devices — will dramatically extend our ability to access and manipulate information.

TBut little attention has been paid to how the these software and standards should be designed to best serve the public interest. Instead, this aspect of the "next generation Internet" has been left almost exclusively to the corporate sector, which brings its own intentions and preoccupations to the field of Net-based interactions. And so:

Questions regarding an individual’s online identity are addressed from the perspective of: What will make you a more effective shopper?

Affinities between individuals online are aggregated and maintained in a way that promotes commercial transactions, rather than enrich the discourse of civil society.

Systems for extracting meaning from online content, improving the power of searches and enabling relevant links between people and documents, are being designed and applied by the corporate sector, while civil society groups have little access to sophisticated matching technologies to support public interest efforts on issues such as energy, health, or hunger.

And perhaps most importantly, a myriad of online communities — both commercial and not-for-profit — have emerged with little to no interoperability with one another. They exist as separate, isolated islands of discourse, unable to exchange meaningful information, leverage their accumulated knowledge, or connect with other communities that share their concerns.

As the Internet’s potential to strengthen the public commons has grown, the public interest sector has done little to insure that the Internet reaches its full potential. Rather, the work of creating online platforms for person-to-person interaction is primarily being driven by the commercial sector, with little public involvement or oversight. But should we expect corporate interests, whose chief motive is profitability, to act in the public interest? In fact, the trends outlined above are pushing the Internet in the exact opposite direction, away from the public commons the Net’s pioneers intended for it to be, and toward a form of organization best compared to a shopping mall.

Software and telecommunications companies are now preparing the infrastructure for the "next generation" Internet. Once a new technology is widely enough adopted, it hits a critical mass of usage and effectively becomes a standard. When this tipping point is reached (to use the popular concept written about by Malcolm Gladwell), society is then wedded to that technical implementation — even if it is not the best available — and it becomes impossible to introduce an alternative. This is the way we ended up with the QWERTY keyboard layout, our fax machine standards, and communication standards such as Ethernet.

The technical architectures of communications systems implicitly carry within themselves political agendas and cultural values. While you cannot predict exactly how people will use communications technology — unexpected uses continually emerge — the architecture does set broad parameters for what the system can or cannot do. Before digital media, the difference between one technical architecture or another may not have been too earth shattering. For instance, while the Beta video tape standard was the best on the market, people lived perfectly well for many years with VHS tapes. But with the introduction of digital media, it is a different story. Once the essential qualities of media became programmable, the range of choice we face increased drastically. Interactivity — the ability to manipulate and change media we use, and to connect with others directly through that media — has become a consistent option, because with digital media the possibility to include interactivity is always present. If the underlying architecture (the floor plan of the Internet itself) does not allow for certain kinds of interactivity, it simply won’t happen. Just as a train can’t go where there are no train tracks, certain kinds of online behavior simply cannot take place unless enabled by the proper standards and code. Digital infrastructure does determine behavior to an extraordinary extent. It may not compel behavior, but it enables only select behavior.

Not to over-simplify a complex issue, but the Internet is at a crossroads and has to choose which path to take, what kinds of interactivity to allow. For example, will people on the Net be able to distribute video from their own computers? Will people in Russia have access to U.S. blogs? Will peer-to-peer interactions be permissible, or might they be strictly limited? Decisions are being made today about what behavior will be allowed online tomorrow. No less important than the above examples are the questions: How will each individual be represented online, and how will this effect the way people are able to meet each other and organize on the Net? Will the "next generation" online community serve only commercial interests, or will it also contribute to the public good? If the public interest sector does not act now, these questions will be answered for us, and a tremendous opportunity to reinvigorate democracy may be lost.

ASN’s Democratic Vision

Of course, not everyone is disturbed by the Internet’s transformation into a vast commercial space of privately held services, with the standards that underlie it set solely by those companies. There are those who insist that the market can solve most of society’s problems, if not all of them, and does that best when left to itself. This attitude, which is partly a stubborn holdover from the dot com boom of the 90s, continues to dominate discussion about the Internet today. Let commercial interests develop the Net with a free hand, it is argued, and the public will ultimately benefit. If something new and cool becomes possible online, then people will pay to do it, which means that businesses will be motivated to make that new functionality available.

In his book The Future of Ideas, Lawrence Lessig offers a convincing counter-argument to this market-centric notion. Nearly all the major innovations that made the Internet possible, he points out, were invented for reasons that had little to do with building businesses and getting rich. In fact, one of the great motivators in creating the Internet was pride in contributing to a healthy public commons. Legions of pioneering engineers effectively donated their "intellectual property" to a shared space owned by no single entity, tweaking code, establishing standards, creating a truly unprecedented, global system of trust. This trust came from a simple fact: Core components of the Internet are made from software and standards in the public domain, or that are shared freely among engineers. In order for new Net-based products to work, the underlying code has to remain dependable and standardized. But the Internet had no mechanisms for legal enforcement. No one could be put in jail for undermining standards on which new programs were based. So what kept people in line? Nothing more than their commitment to contribute to a communal enterprise. Every time an engineer participated in writing software for a new Net-based project, his actions expressed a profound trust in the system. This implicit trust not only guided the writing of code, but as suggested by John Perry Barlow’s comment earlier, it was reflected in the culture of online communities — until the commercialization of the Internet in the 90s.

For-profit businesses participated in the making of the Internet, of course. But they did so within a larger "ecosystem" that put the public commons first. In his book, Lessig does a wonderful job of explaining how this happened, how the public commons approach led to a digital platform that is used by for-profit and not-for-profit entities alike. But, as Lessig repeatedly demonstrates, the dominant ethos of the Internet, which supported its relentless innovation and extraordinary growth, was that of a public commons.

Without trusted relationships, civil society comes undone. Francis Fukuyama and others have made a case for the centrality of trust to our economic life, and of course trust is the essential ingredient for democratic governance. But as many commentators have noted, in recent years trust has been in decline in our society. The issue is complex and opinions vary about causes. However, whether it is the barrage of corporate scandals, the low esteem in which most people hold the news media (the source of our public knowledge), or the controversy over vote counting in Florida, symptoms of distrust are rampant.

Commentators dating to Alexis de Tocqueville have credited the importance of community organizations in providing forums where trusted relationships can take shape. Churches, schools, libraries, clubs of all kinds, public meeting spaces — these local institutions have been the breeding ground for democratic engagement. It is now commonplace to bemoan the widespread erosion of these institutions, which have been hobbled by challenges to traditional spiritual practices, the realities of two-career households, the pressures of an expanding work week, and a steady diet of television. Little attention has been given to the development of new social forms, appropriate to our time, that could re-engage citizens with their neighbors and revitalize democracy.

The early Internet is an inspirational model for how a system with the appropriate initial conditions can generate trust among its participants, providing fertile ground for collaboration that leads to extraordinary innovation. Might the next-generation Internet be a locus for trust on a grand scale that could reinvigorate civil society?

The idea behind the ASN is to reestablish the Internet as a platform for trust, as it had originally been. We propose doing this by building trust into the architecture of a next-generation of online community, so that this system of trust can span the entire Internet. As mentioned above, the original architecture of the Net treated identity and trust as issues that people online would sort out themselves. There was no mechanism put in place to assure you of the identity of others. Back then it wasn’t necessary, because the online world was so small, relatively speaking, that people tended to act responsibly in order to protect their reputation.

The intent of the ASN is to support global accountability online, in order to provide a mechanism for introducing people who share affinities or complementary capabilities, enable them to more easily share media among themselves, and allow them to create ad hoc social networks around specific, narrowly defined topics. In essence, the ASN would apply the power of network computing to the process of group formation — across the Internet as a whole.

As we discuss later in this paper, various flavors of this kind of "introduction" technology are being incorporated into online community infrastructures today. However, each of these communities operates as a "walled castle," separate and distinct from the rest of the Internet. The knowledge and relationships generated inside one community do not travel beyond its borders. The ASN will allow for narrowly defined, carefully targeted interconnections between communities, so that knowledge and relationships can be leveraged across the Internet as a whole. It also proposes a set of tools to be "plugged in" to community infrastructures that will support this enhanced communication across existing social networks.

How would the ASN contribute to a stronger 21st century democracy? First, it calls for treating an individual’s online persistent identity as an extension of citizenship; it recognizes that identity in the digital age can and should be configured to support civil society. Secondly, it treats the Internet as a public territory, an open and integrated system that the citizens of the planet hold in common (and which hosts both commercial and not-for-profit initiatives). Third, it enables individuals to more easily meet others outside their existing social networks with whom they can collaborate on public interest issues, as well as share information and media.

Personal empowerment — the ability to take effective action to shape society — occurs when an individual can make the link between information and the opportunity to act on that information. You might say that there is an "algorithm for empowerment" that transforms information into knowledge by providing a context for interpretation and action. By participating in social networks, each of us is able to communicate with others in a way that offers the opportunity to take effective action. The ASN extends this opportunity even further by using the Internet to link people across social networks. In particular, it fosters a non-hierarchical distribution of information, and encourages decentralized forms of organization, which can appear in an ad hoc fashion, swarming into existence around a particular objective, and then dissipating when the objective has been accomplished.

In effect, the ASN promises new tools that will support citizen involvement in governance. Just as citizens in a democracy are guaranteed the right of assembly in a public space — in order to meet one another, share ideas, organize among themselves, and gather in groups so their voices can be heard — the ASN proposes a form of public assembly in the virtual realm. But unlike the real world, every form of behavior in digital space has to be enabled by the writing of code. Off-line, public assembly will simply take place if not hampered by restrictions, but online activity has to be deliberately facilitated.

Already de facto standards for online identity and trust are being established. But where is the voice of civil society in these discussions? It is in the areas of identity and trusted relationships that the Internet can most effect the future of democratic governance: By determining under what conditions individuals represent themselves online, and how they are permitted to meet others, share information, and self-organize.

Four interdependent elements

Achieving the ASN will require a shift in perspective about both the objectives of online community, and how best to approach its technical framework.

The ASN will not be accomplished through the writing of a single piece of software, or through the proclamations of a standards body, like the World Wide Web Consortium [3]. Rather, it will need simultaneous action on a number of different technical fronts. These technical areas have never before been grouped as a single, well-defined set of interlocking topics to be addressed in a coordinated manner. The main challenge is not technical, because no engineering breakthrough is needed to bring the ASN into existence. From an engineering perspective, the challenges are relatively modest. Rather, the greatest challenge is conceptual.

To achieve its objectives, the ASN weaves together four distinct technical areas, and calls for specific development strategies in each. Considerable work is being done in pursuit of key aspects this technical work (though the public interest is not being adequately represented in any of these processes). The ASN approach is unique in that we treat these separate fields as components of an interdependent system. It is based on a coherent vision that leverages each as part of a greater whole.

The four main elements of the ASN are:

Persistent Identity. Enabling individuals online to maintain a persistent identity as they move between different Internet communities, and to have personal control over that identity. This identity should be multifarious and ambiguous (as identity is in life itself), capable of reflecting an endless variety of interests, needs, desires, and relationships. It should not be reduced to a recitation of our purchase preferences, since who we are can not be reduced to what we buy.

Interoperability Between Online Communities. People should be able to cross easily between online communities under narrowly defined circumstances, just as in life we can move from one social network to another. Protocols and standards need to be developed and adopted to enable this interoperability. This interoperability should include the ability to identify and contact others with shared affinities or complementary capabilities, and to share digital media with them, enabling valuable information to pass from one online community to the next in an efficient manner. To support ASN-type activity, modularized enhancements to the technical infrastructures of separate online communities will need to be developed and adopted.

Brokered Relationships. Using databased information, online brokers (both automated and "live") should be able to facilitate the introduction between people who share affinities and/or complementary capabilities and are seeking to make connections. In this manner, the proverbial "six degrees of separation" can be collapsed to one, two or three degrees — in a way that is both effective and that respects privacy. Such a system of brokered relationships should also enable people to find information or media that is of interest to them, through the recommendations of trusted third parties.

Public Interest Matching Technologies. The Semantic Web is perhaps the best known effort to create a global "dictionary" of shared terms to facilitate finding information online that is of interest to you. Within the ASN, a public interest initiative around matching technologies, including ontologies and taxonomies, will enable you to find other people with whom you share affinities — no matter which online communities they belong to. These matching technologies need to be broad and robust enough to include the full range of political discussion about issues of public interest. They should not be confined to commercial or narrowly academic topics; NGOs and other public interest entities need to be represented in the process that determines these matching technologies.

This technical work could be achieved through many different "flavors" of implementations (most of which, we believe, would be relatively low cost). There is no single way to achieve the ASN. Rather, there are a variety of paths to a "next generation" online community. As technology keeps improving, and the landscape of companies and standards continues to change, any meaningful implementation will require an evaluation of the realistic possibilities available, and opportunistic decisions about which avenue is best to pursue. In this paper we offer recommendations for a series of not-for-profit and commercial initiatives, but with the understanding that these will inevitably evolve with time.

The objectives we propose, however, will remain unchanged.

The ASN user experience

Suppose the ASN was in place today. How would it enhance your online experience? Without delving into technical details, and risking oversimplification, here are some examples of how it would work:

Scenario 1. "Finding Others Who Share Affinities or Complementary Capabilities"

Jim and Bob are both members of the same online community of people interested in organic farming. Over time they become familiar with one another, and trust each others’ opinions. But because they live in different parts of the country, they have never met off-line. Because their organic farming online community restricts discussion to narrowly relevant topics, Jim and Bob are unaware that they share a strong interest in solar energy — even though they both belong to separate online communities that specialize in that subject. So when Jim develops a solar energy project, and is soliciting support for it, he never approaches Bob — because the mechanism to connect the two, given the current state of online community, does not exist. But with an Augmented Social Network, with its robust system for persistent identity, Jim would be able to search member profiles of the organic farming community, discover Bob’s interest in solar energy, and make a solicitation.

In particular, Jim might be working on a project that requires legal advice, and is looking for a lawyer who is expert in zoning. Unfortunately, there are no such lawyers in Jim’s solar energy group. But Bob’s group does have a zoning specialist, Sara. Using search tools provided through the ASN, once Jim had established a relationship with Bob he would be able to discover that Bob is connected to Sara, a lawyer whose capabilities compliment Jim’s work very well. Jim could then approach Sara about the project.

Scenario 2. "Links Between Communities with Common Interests"

On Jim’s solar energy online community, a debate is raging about a technical detail regarding solar cells. Among the 50 people who participate in the discussion, no one has the expertise to answer this question. On Bob’s solar energy community, however, there is one person who does have this expertise, and in fact has posted this answer online months before. But because the specific vocabulary he used is not what the people in Jim’s group anticipated — it does not closely match their expectations of the answer — their Web searches do not find this post. With the ASN, there are two different solutions for connecting Jim’s group with the answer posted on Bob’s community. First, with a public-interest effort to create appropriate matching technologies, including ontologies and taxonomies, a sophisticated schema for the topic of solar energy would be written, so that searches are geared to meaning and do not rely on the use of exact language — so the original search would have found the post on Bob’s community site. But, even more intriguing, with a system of interoperable communities in place a member of Jim’s community would have been able to send a query to any or all of the solar energy online communities that exist. Then the expert on Bob’s community would have been able to respond to the question directly, not only resolving their debate, but perhaps providing additional information of great value to the discussion.

Scenario 3. "Media Forwarded From Trusted Sources"

As it happens, Jim’s solar energy group is comprised largely of journalists, writers, and theorists, while Bob’s group is mostly engineers, mechanics, and sales people in the solar energy business. While Jim’s group focuses more on political trends, Bob’s group engages in detailed discussions of implementation. A member of Jim’s group does an interview with an important solar energy engineer for a small magazine, and decides to make this interview available for free on the Internet. So he sends it to the members of Jim’s online group, where it is read and discussed. Given the current state of online community, the chances that members of Bob’s group encounter this interview are completely arbitrary, even though its subject matter relates directly to their interests. But with the ASN in place, because of the trusted relationship between Jim and Bob, the interview would automatically be forwarded from Jim to Bob, and would then automatically be forwarded to interested members of Bob’s group. The ASN would facilitate the distribution of media between trusted sources who share affinities (while taking all necessary precautions to protect privacy, and filter out unwanted materials).

Scenario 4. "Automated Personal Introductions Across Communities"

Members of Bob’s group are interested in setting up a test implementation of solar cells in a poor South American village, to explore the practicality of a particular technology in that environment. However, they don’t have any contacts in South America, and without contacts in the region they are unable to proceed. They don’t even know how to begin reaching out to find someone they can trust to partner with. Among Jim’s solar group, there is a journalist, Sam, who used to cover energy issues in Buenos Aires and is still in contact with many people in the region. Today, making the connection from Bob’s group to the Latin American expert in Jim’s group, and then to the appropriate people in Latin America is extremely cumbersome, if it is even possible (without a good deal of work and luck). But with a robust system of online persistent identity, interoperable communities, and brokered relationships, Bob would be able to discover that Jim knows Sam, and an automated system could connect Bob with him. The same system would enable Sam to evaluate Bob’s reputation and decide if Bob is someone he can trust in this matter. If so, Sam would then provide an introduction to contacts in Argentina.

Scenario 5. "Brokered Personal Introductions Across Communities"

For Sam, connecting Bob to acquaintances in Buenos Aires has relatively low risk. While Sam hopes that Bob and his group are competent, and handle themselves professionally, if things do not go well it will have little effect on Sam’s reputation. However, if Sam knew the mayor of Buenos Aires, and Bob approached Sam specifically because of that highly prized relationship, Sam would probably not be willing to provide an introduction so casually. In certain low risk situations an automated introduction would be sufficient to connect people who have shared affinities or complementary capabilities. But for more sensitive — and likely valuable — relationships, a more sophisticated brokering mechanism is necessary to instill trust in the system. Were Bob looking specifically for a contact to the mayor of Buenos Aires, he would first approach a third party broker who could provide an introduction to someone capable of contacting the mayor, such as Sam. In this scenario, Sam would not simply receive an e-mail from Bob, a stranger who had received an automated reference to him via Jim. Rather, Sam would be approached by a brokering service, who would provide a vetted introduction to Bob. Assured by the brokering service that Bob is trustworthy, Sam could then evaluate whether to connect Bob to the mayor.

Conclusion: As these scenarios demonstrate, the ASN enhances the way that social networks operate off-line, by making possible more efficient forms of behavior through the use of digital technology. Of course, crucial issues will need to be resolved in order for this system to be effective. We are sober and realistic about these challenges. But, as we will show below, many of the technical issues are being addressed right now. However, most of these are being worked on in the commercial sector, and will lead to implementations that are not necessarily in the public interest. Which is to say: Just because the ASN can be achieved does not mean that it will be.

In fact, without a concerted, coordinated public interest effort, this system to support online social networks is much less likely to come about.

Tools to enhance citizenship

The ASN automates certain types of interpersonal behavior that the Internet, as it currently stands, does not actively encourage. Of course, the connection-making described in the scenarios above does happen, on occasion. But in those cases serendipity plays a far greater role than science (while the commercial trends now driving the Net will make even this modest level of interconnectivity more difficult). The purpose of the ASN is to turn these kinds of connections into a prominent part of the daily online community experience.

By doing so, the ASN will not only give greater depth and flexibility to the way that individuals who share affinities can meet each other and exchange information. It will also extend the power of online social networks to organize themselves to take actions — by making it easier for people who have common interests to find one another and share media efficiently among themselves. Democracy is based on the belief that a well-informed populace will self-organize to influence public policy and participate in its own governance. The ASN approach is to enhance online community in a way that will enable people to inform themselves and self-organize more effectively, in order to create more opportunities for engaged citizenship.

How might the ASN make a difference? Here are a few examples:

Greater Participation in Governance. While an increasing amount of information has become available to the average person about decisions made by government (through documents published on the Internet, C-SPAN coverage of the legislature, etc.), there has been no corresponding extension of the individual’s ability to act on that information in a way that effects policy. In fact, the opposite has occurred. For many people, politics has never been more of a spectator sport. As currently constituted, digital media tools have rarely been able to effect votes in U.S. Congress. For example, though e-mail to many representatives in Washington ran strongly against waging war in Iraq, Congress voted to support the war by a wide margin. The expressed opinion of constituents, in itself, is rarely seen by elected officials as sufficient reason to change or modify a position. Politicians are sensitive, however, to expressed opinions that are connected to the potential for meaningful action — whether that might be a campaign contribution, or a story in the media, or the mobilizing of voters on election day. E-communications have only been able to influence Washington when they enable constituents to organize among themselves to take collaborative actions, as in the case of MoveOn.org. By enhancing online community so that information is more closely linked to the ability to self-organize, the ASN offers a more powerful platform for coordinated engagement by the people with their government. Smart politicians would seek to use the ASN to strengthen their connection to their constituencies, just as political organizers of all kinds have always used the media forms available to them as best they can. But where pre-digital media was largely about broadcasting information to a passive listener, the ASN extends the Net’s interactivity so that participants are more likely to take action based on what they learn — and organize events that shape the way policy is determined by government.

Self-Organizing Around Issues. There are many millions of people around the world who are concerned about global warming. However, there is now no simple way for these people to become aware of themselves as a distinct group, and organize a specific action to take in unison. With the ASN, and its emphasis on connecting people who share affinities and/or complementary capabilities across different social networks, this group and others like it could self-identify with an ease that had never been possible before. The ASN would allow for large international networks of individuals who share interests to become an important part of the political debate. These issue-specific networks could be a countervailing power that offsets the disproportionate influence of global corporations today.

Alternative Economies. There is a good deal of attention being given to the development of community and complementary currencies, barter economies of various kinds, "green" businesses that follow sustainable environmental practices, and not-for-profit alternatives to standard corporate models. The ASN lends itself particularly well to these initiatives, by making it easier for people to find others who share narrowly defined interests. Moreover, the ASN’s ability to distribute relevant information between trusted sources should be particularly intriguing to those who want to exchange goods and services. It might prove to be more effective at attracting attention to a product or service than advertising.

Decentralizing Decision-Making. As globalization has increased everyday access to individuals and materials from around the world, much attention has been given to the creation of non-hierarchical approaches to group formation and decision-making that can leverage these unprecedented relationships and resources in an inclusive, respectful, and just manner. The ASN would be an extremely useful tool to support these efforts toward "good globalization," because it encourages introductions and information sharing across social borders, challenging traditional hierarchies. In addition, it fosters trusted relationships through the Internet, enabling people who share interests to pursue innovative approaches to collective action with others they meet online.

ASN and the Digital Divide

The Digital Divide is a serious challenge that must be addressed. It is crucial to the future of a just, egalitarian society that the Internet not only be the domain of elites. Some might say that until this imbalance in Internet access is rectified, a project like the ASN should not be a priority. However, were the ASN to be implemented, the argument to address the Digital Divide becomes even more compelling — because it would be an open acknowledgement of the importance of the Internet to a functioning democracy. Any nation would be well served by having access to the Internet considered to be a requirement for every citizen, in order for each person to be well-informed and engaged in their governance.

Attention given to the ASN should not be seen as competitive with Digital Divide efforts. Rather, the two are highly complementary, and should be pursued in parallel.

Part 2: ASN technical components

ASN architecture

When new functionality is introduced to the Internet, in most cases it comes in the form of a software package, like e-mail or Web pages. This software, if it is successful, will then be adopted gradually. Eventually, once enough people have chosen to use the new functionality, it becomes a de facto standard, an additional element that contributes something unique to the Internet’s complex infrastructure. At a certain point its use becomes ubiquitous, and it is seen as a core element of the Internet, as e-mail or Web pages are today.

We believe that the ASN could be achieved through a similar approach of gradual adoption. But because the ASN is not a single piece of software that can be plugged into existing systems, because it is not simply a new application, it needs to be treated somewhat differently. As mentioned above, the ASN will require a coordinated effort to develop appropriate applications, protocols, and standards in four related but separate technical areas. The technical challenges, in themselves, are not considerable. The development and adoption of the necessary standards poses a greater challenge. But by following a deliberate, focused strategy we believe that the ASN can be brought into existence.

The intention is for the ASN to become the de facto standard for Internet-wide online community interactions — the functionality described in the scenarios above should be the norm. But it is important to understand that the ASN can be effective if used by only a fraction of the Internet’s community members. The ASN can be launched as a sub-set of all online community activity. Then, over time, as it proves itself to be valuable, the ASN’s applications, protocols, and standards can be adopted by a growing number of Internet communities.

What follows is a description of the technical architecture for the Augmented Social Network. Think of it as a map of interrelated initiatives necessary to bring the ASN into being. Readers not familiar with the technical vocabulary of persistent identity, online community infrastructures, and matching technologies may find it opaque. We suggest that they skip this section, and go directly to the next section on Persistent Identity. The remainder of the document following this technical synopsis unpacks its dense language, and discusses the key concepts at greater length.

This plan is not meant to provide the single, definitive blueprint for achieving a system as complex as the ASN. Rather, there are a variety of paths to the ultimate goal. Our purpose here is to be more suggestive than prescriptive. We lay out the essential elements of an interlocking system, and propose ways that they can be made to work together. But digital media is a moving target, continually evolving and improving. Solutions we propose today could be superseded by new innovations over the next 18 months. Moreover, the greatest challenge to creating the ASN is not technical; much of the essential technology for it already exists, or is in development. Rather, the challenge is in adapting this technology to serve the public interest. For that reason, decisions about implementation of the ASN will have to be made in response to the best options available at the time the initiative takes place. The main objectives, however, will remain unchanged.

The technical strategy: To enhance the power of social networks by using interactive digital media to exploit the transitive nature of trust through the principle of six degrees of connection. Much has been written about the role played by social networks in civil society, by theorists as diverse as Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Duncan Watts, Mark Granovetter, Malcom Gladwell, and Manuel Castells. The Augmented Social Network (ASN) seeks to bring a greater level of efficiency and effectiveness to purposeful and goal-oriented social networks by improving the ability of digital communications to support the social networking process. By doing so, the ASN will provide needed tools to enhance non-hierarchical, rhizomatic forms of social organization in the digital era.

This technical program will extend online communities of practice beyond the borders of their existing social networks, by relying on the recommendations and associative capabilities of trusted third parties, in order to add efficiency and effectiveness to: (a) Introductions between those who share affinities or have complementary capabilities; (b) The distribution of media among those who share affinities; and, (c) The ability of groups that share affinities to quickly self-organize around narrowly defined objectives.

The essential technical elements of the ASN are as follows:

Persistent Identity. As federated network identity becomes ubiquitous on the Internet, spearheaded by industry initiatives such as the Liberty Alliance and Passport, civil society organizations will need to articulate a public interest approach to persistent online identity that supports the public commons. As one aspect of a public interest vision of persistent identity, we propose (a) a civil society digital profile that represents an individual’s interests and concerns that relate to his or her role as a citizen engaged in forms of democratic governance. One aspect of this civil society approach would be to provide a working model for persistent identity that gives individuals a high level of control over how their profile is used. In particular, the digital profile should include the ability for each individual to (b) express affinities and capabilities, and to list or assist in the discovery of other trusted individuals who share these interests. The purpose of this functionality is to enable automated agents or third party brokers to access this data in a digital profile, through a series of (c) introduction protocols, in order to provide connections between individuals who share affinities or have complementary capabilities. In this way, the ASN is able to introduce those who have shared affinities or complementary capabilities, including those who are members of wholly distinct online communities, based on the recommendations of trusted third parties. These recommendations might either be fully automated, in the case of less valuable or less sensitive relationships, or take place through a brokering service, when privacy, trust, and stakeholdership is of the highest concern.

Enhancements to Online Community Infrastructure. Some "walled garden" online communities have begun to implement ASN-type functionality within the confines of a single community infrastructure. With the implementation of the ASN, automated ASN interactions will take place across existing online community environments. In order to support this activity, modularized enhancements to the technical infrastructures of separate online communities will need to be developed and adopted. These enhancements are essentially of two types. The first is the writing and adoption of (a) interoperability protocols that will enable communication between the membership management databases of distinct online community infrastructures, so that ASN-related data can flow between separate online communities. The second is the development of modularized applications that enable (b) the pre-processing and post-processing of e-mail communications on online community infrastructures, as well as the ability to compose, address, and tag ASN messages appropriately. These applications would facilitate three types of activity. First, they would enable ASN users to (c) receive specially tagged automated introductions to others with whom they share affinities or have complementary capabilities. These automated introductions may include the name of the person who provided the third party recommendation. Secondly, they would enable (d) automated forwarding of relevant media, based on the expressed affinities of the individual stored as part of his digital profile. Third, they would enable (e) the generation of ad hoc social networks based on expressed affinities and the recommendations or introductions through trusted third parties. These ad hoc social networks would be initiated by an individual sending a request for participation in a narrowly defined project; the message would then be forwarded automatically based on data in digital profiles; the resulting ad hoc community (or swarm) would dissolve with the completion of the stated objective. Online community infrastructures would authenticate the identity of ASN users, and (f) implement reputation mechanisms to enforce accountability for past actions. Reputation mechanisms would reside within the community infrastructure, determined by the context, concerns, and rules appropriate to the needs of each particular community.

Matching Technologies. For the ASN to be effective, the civil society issues addressed within the system have to be easily identified by searches, with matches made even when exact use of language does not correspond. To facilitate high quality searching which supports online discourse and networking in the public interest, there is a need for an initiative to develop (a) matching technologies for topics relevant to civil society, including public interest ontologies and taxonomies. Focused efforts must be established to insure that ontologies and taxonomies developed with standards such as XML, RDF and topic maps include consideration of those issues relevant to civil society. In addition, the ASN would develop (b) protocols for the interoperability of online ontological frameworks, so that the same set of data could be encountered through multiple perspectives, enabling comparisons of diverse viewpoints, which in itself would lead to new connections between disparate social networks.

Brokering Services. In instances when personal relationships are highly prized and carefully guarded, though still available through the ASN, an automated introduction system would not be advisable. In these cases, ASN users would engage a third party brokering service to carefully analyze potential affinity or complementary capability matches, and to provide (a) a brokered introduction. These interactions would not necessarily take place only within existing online community infrastructures, but also through the auspices of a brokering service that exists as a separate entity, designed to facilitate these more sensitive introductions. In these special cases, (b) context specific introduction protocols would be developed, allowing each social network to establish the terms through which introductions are made at a highly granular level, perhaps including intermediaries in the process in order to facilitate the initial person-to-person interactions.

Conclusion: These interdependent technical initiatives form a comprehensive vision for a next generation online community that will enhance the capability of social networks to create knowledge, spur innovation, and engage citizens in the governance of their democracy.

Let us now examine each of these initiatives in detail, and see how they relate to the greater whole.

Persistent identity

Overview: A new era of identity

Off-line the question of individual identity is fairly straightforward. It is understood that you are who you represent yourself to be, in most cases, and that your identity can be verified by some form of documentation (which might include, for example, a birth certificate, driver’s license, credit card, passport, or letters or recommendation). In most instances you will choose to keep some aspect of your identity private (like a speeding ticket, or a failing grade in school), but you do so in the context of being able to present your "complete self" to others whenever you choose to do so.

On the Internet, however, identity is a far less subtle, and more complicated issue. The Internet, as it is configured today, is poorly suited to support the multifarious nature of identity that we take for granted in daily life. As technologists like to phrase it, the Internet now has a very weak form of identity that is not capable of mirroring how we operate in the real world. Each of us may have one, or several, e-mail addresses, but that specific identification says little about who we are, our interests, or our experience.

The World Wide Web is a super-set of the Internet built on top of the fundamental organizing principal of domain names, which are used in the creation of URLs. Each URL is a "Web site," or a location on the Internet that individuals can visit by clicking on hyperlinks. Once a URL is established, it essentially becomes the private property of the person or group that is administering it — the site becomes whatever the site’s director chooses for it to be, at a whim.

But while the Web has developed a sophisticated system for the creation of "sites," there has yet to appear a good means to represent each of us as individuals in cyberspace. Every time we visit a new Web site, we enter as an anonymous person. Then, with our own labor, we create an identity within that specific site, following the rules as they are presented to us (For example: "Please click here to register ..."). Once we establish our identity on that Web site, it effectively becomes the property of the Web site owner. For this reason, URL-based communities are like walled castles with one-way doors; once you have created an identity on that Web site, it is only of use on that same Web site; it can never escape.

The problem presented by identity online is fundamentally a social issue, not a technical one. In the real world, we tend to think of our official "identity" — that which is documented — as the minimum verification necessary to confirm that a person is who she says she is. The intention of a free society is to make the threshold for the representation of identity as low as possible. The resistance to identity cards in the United States is an example of the discomfort that most people feel about the prospect of having their personal information captured in a database, where it may be used without their permission. The challenge for a free society is to make the verification of official identity as unobtrusive and "thin" as possible. At the same time, before the Internet, collecting and organizing information pertaining to a "documented identity" required a extensive, well coordinated bureaucracy.

The Internet flips the subject of "documented identity" on its head, because — in theory — every action made online can be traced, stored, and analyzed so easily. During the Cold War, East Germany built a hugely expensive and ornate apparatus for just this purpose. The Internet, however, simplifies the task of data retention to such a degree that it becomes possible for profit-making businesses to specialize in the capturing, interpretation and reselling of personal information. Governments, too, have come to appreciate the relative low cost of aggressive data collection and the many efficiencies it could bring to law enforcement. At this point, such far-reaching systems are only beginning to be deployed (in Las Vegas casinos, for instance). But their implementation by marketing executives or the U.S. Department of Justice can be curtailed by law and appropriate oversight. Civil libertarians are right to be concerned, especially as norms for the use of personal information on the Internet are still emerging.

It should go without saying that any form of online identity must be designed to prevent, as best as possible, abuses of trust and unwanted violations of privacy rights from occurring. But a progressive vision for online identity should be more than a defensive posture meant to protect individuals from unwelcome incursions on their personal data. Might this same technology be used to strengthen democracy and support a more engaged citizenship? Shouldn’t we ask: in an ideal world, what kind of online identity would we want?

It is worth noting that as computing becomes ubiquitous, and surveillance cameras and global positioning devices grow commonplace, the distinction between actions "online" and "off-line" will grow increasingly fuzzy. The tracing and analyzing of an individual’s actions will become just as possible in the physical world as on the Internet. The difference between the two, in this regard, will soon be meaningless. Think of the famous scene in Steven Spielberg’s movie Minority Report, when Tom Cruise goes to a clothing store: Cameras follow him from the minute he walks in the door; he is identified as a customer in the store’s database, and his purchase history is accessed so that the store’s automated system can make customized recommendations. Such a digital profile will not only include clothes bought at the brick-and-mortar store itself, but also items ordered online, or at other stores anywhere in the world. This integration of data collected over the Internet with data captured in the real world is already underway. So by addressing the issue of online identity today, we set the stage for a broader discussion about all forms of personal identity, vis-à-vis society, in the near future.

We are not used to thinking of the representation of our identity as something that we can deliberately design. Never before have we faced the question: How do you build an identity for public use? But the Internet makes this question inevitable. We will all have to consider how we want ourselves to be represented by digital proxies. In the near future, you will build an online identity through an accretion of your actions and expressed affinities — whether you are aware of it or not. Every online choice you make could potentially contribute to your digital profile.

To sum up, your digital profile is a representation of aspects of your self that accretes over time. In effect, it is a cumulative digital proxy of you that is built from a pre-determined set of components. The emergence of this new kind of identity representation forces us to think differently about "official" identity than we did in pre-digital times. Traditionally, in an open and democratic society, "documented identity" is meant to be as thin as possible. However, in the digital age it will be different. Some form of digital representation of your identity will exist. It will, by its very nature, say more about you than your current forms of identification — which have relatively thin information.

Many will protest that they do not want any form of online identity to be put in place. But the commercial sector is already creating the infrastructure that will support it, and there is nothing illegal about aggregating the information about what you buy that the system is being based upon. The challenge is not to stop this process, but rather to engage with it and influence it in order to insure that personal identity is implemented in the public interest, so that the system enhances, rather than detracts from, the public commons. The challenge facing progressives and civil libertarians is to acknowledge that we are entering a new era, and to see that with it — alongside the true danger it presents to individual privacy if abused — comes an extraordinary potential to improve public life. But first we must accept that "documented identity" will become the converse of what it had been in the past, when the guiding principle was "less is more." Though it is far from a given, online identity could open opportunities for positive forms of behavior, including newly empowered forms of citizenship, that were inconceivable before networked computing.

From Shopping To Self

Given the commanding role that the market now plays in our society, it should not be surprising that commerce has been the engine driving the development of systems and standards to support online identity for the "next generation Internet." While there are a number of public interest initiatives in this area, they are hampered by a lack of resources, and an inability to forcefully represent the needs of civil society within the bodies that are setting standards for industry. For example, the Internet Engineering Task Force [4] has been developing a system for online contracts that connects identity to reputation in an innovative fashion. Also, projects like XNS.org, One Name, and the Identity Commons are contributing significant intellectual work in this area. However, without industry clout, or a mandate from the public interest sector, their efforts are unable to acquire the momentum necessary to effect industry-only efforts. In the software field, establishing a high adoption rate is critical to a technology’s success; it is critical to reach the tipping point where the new piece of software becomes ubiquitous. In part because these worthy efforts are short on resources, and in part because they have not been able to attract significant attention from their natural constituencies (the public interest sphere), they have yet to exert much influence on the shaping of online identity systems. As a result, the problems that online identity is now being designed to solve are the problems of business. The enhancements that online identity might bring to the public commons are not even discussed in forums where decisions are made.

Until recently, online identity came in one of two basic flavors. The first is domain name-specific. Most online communities require the user to register; from this registration a digital profile is created. While in many cases this profile may be no more than an e-mail address, it might also include date of birth, zip code, occupation, and perhaps a credit card number or two. The large online stores have invested considerable resources to create databases that track and analyze purchases; this information then becomes part of each customer’s digital profile. If you work for a big company, chances are that you have a digital profile that permits access to certain parts of your employer’s intranet, while denying you access to other areas. As an average Web surfer, you likely have created dozens, if not hundreds, of digital profiles for yourself on Web sites all over the Internet. As of today, these separate profiles remain unconnected from one another. They do not "speak" to each other and compare notes. But that is about to change.

The second type of online identity is one that is shared between two electronic elements. Usually this is a domain name-related entity such as a Web site or e-mail handler, and another computer client such as a personal computer or server. Generally this does nothing more than confirm that you are who you (as versed to a trusted third party) claim to be for the purposes of a particular online transaction. Companies like VeriSign have developed systems that narrowly address the problem of verification: How can a Web site be certain that the visitor, or shopper, is who she says she is? They provide a "digital certificate" to confirm that the person who initially registered for a service as John Doe is in fact the same John Doe when he clicks to purchase a CD from Amazon or Buy.com. This is a contingent form of identity, one that is dependent on the context in which a transaction takes place. The individual’s identity online need not correspond to his identity off-line. In fact, in a famous case, VeriSign issued a digital certificate to an entity called "Microsoft Corporation," enabling it to make online transactions using digital signed certificates that appeared to come from the software giant. Because online identity does not have to correspond to identity in the real world, the necessary verification required to make sure this online "Microsoft Corporation" was the same as Bill Gates’ business in Redmond did not take place.

Digital certificates, like those provided by VeriSign, simply confirm that a person has the authority to act on behalf of the person he or she claims to be. They are not designed to provide client websites with any information other than identity verification, and that information is communicated to the client Web site only when a transaction is taking place.

In recent years, online businesses began to see the advantages of a persistent identity that could be maintained by an individual as she surfs from site to site. A persistent identity would combine the aggregated information about a person that sophisticated Web sites currently collect with the verification feature enabled by digital certificates — so that a user’s digital profile could be shared by websites who choose to federate with one another. One of the major initiatives to establish such a form of federated network identity is the Liberty Alliance. In the introduction to the Liberty Alliance specifications document, the objective is succinctly expressed:
"Today, one’s identity on the Internet is fragmented across various identity providers — employers, Internet portals, various communities, and business services. This fragmentation yields isolated, high-friction, one-to-one customer-to-business relationships and experiences.

Federated network identity is the key to reducing this friction and realizing new business taxonomies and opportunities, coupled with new economies of scale. In this new world of federated commerce, a user’s online identity, personal profile, personalized online configurations, buying habits and history, and shopping preferences will be administered by the user and securely shared with the organizations of the user’s choosing."

There is a strong inclination today to treat online identity as the aggregation of the transactions you make while on the Internet — most of which are purchases. The implication is: You are what you buy. Of course, the reason for this narrow focus is understandable. Technology and telecommunications companies want to increase online sales, and they see federated network identity as one path to profitability. Of course, it is undeniably true that the products you choose do reflect an aspect of who you are. A digital profile that includes a history of your purchase choices, the Web services you use, your medical records, and your travel itineraries would paint a portrait of you that is not without insight. But, at the same time, that portrait would be incomplete. It would leave out many important things about yourself, including the parts you probably value most — which are likely those most pertinent to participation in the public commons. These aspects would include your political concerns, your relationships with others, and the ways you choose to engage with your community and government.

Because the commercial sector is alone at the table when federated network identity is discussed, the architecture of the system is being tailor made for business, with little regard given to the potential for other uses. Privacy regulations do have a bearing on the development of these standards, and some regulatory agencies have challenged the most egregious examples of aggressive identity data collection. For instance, recently the European Union challenged Microsoft’s use of personal data collected through Passport. As a result, Microsoft agreed to give users more choice in determining what data the system collects can be used without permission. But these regulatory measures are reactive, not proactive. They are not expressions of a well-considered, progressive, civil society vision of online identity. Rather, they tend to be projections of 20th century privacy rights into the very different realm of the 21st century.

As suggested above, how we shape online identity now will have broad ramifications for how our identity is represented both online and off-line in the near future. We are setting precedents, and building the underlying infrastructure for the representation of identity in the digital age. What we do today can not help but influence what happens tomorrow. So it is crucial that we ask the right questions, and cut through to the core issues at stake.

How will an individual’s digital profile be compiled, and who will control it? Certainly these two questions are central to the issues raised by online identity. In fact, much of the discussion about online identity revolves around how to resolve these questions. But a third question is just as important, though it is seldom raised: What should my online identity say about me?

The challenge is to establish a form of federated network identity that is an appropriate representation of the self, one that is flexible enough to provide a range of "public faces," depending on context. Certainly, information that facilitates commercial transactions should be a part of this identity — but only part. Defining the full potential of online identity, and pushing for the actualization of that vision as part of the development of the "next generation" Internet, deserves to be a public interest priority.

Current efforts in identity

While there are several independent initiatives focusing on persistent identity, the field is being paced by two large scale efforts that, because of their access to resources and their position in the market, dominate discussion of the issue — and will likely determine the system everyone else will ultimately use to implement federated network identity. These are the Liberty Alliance, which was mentioned above, Microsoft’s .Net identity system, named Passport [5].

Passport was the first out of the box. It was launched in 1999, and had the benefit of the vast database of registered members that Microsoft had accumulated for its various services. Most notably, the HotMail Web mail site had many millions of subscribers. Each of those accounts became Passport members, assuming that they chose to take advantage of the system. Today, Passport claims over 200 million members, though it is not clear how many of those people deliberately signed on to be Passport users. In fact, Microsoft has faced significant resistance to Passport from other companies, who cast a suspicious eye on every new project that storms out of Redmond. In the field, there is great concern that online identity — including each user’s personal profile — might become property of a single corporation. Such centralized control would be a devastating blow to the kind of "circle of trust" that advocates feel is essential to the success of an identity system. Not to mention the red flags it would raise for civil libertarians.

In response to the Microsoft effort, Sun Microsystems rallied together some 30 prominent companies — including Apache Software Group, NTT DoCoMo, Nokia, VISA, RSA Security, Real Networks, BankAmerica, and Vodaphone — to form the Liberty Alliance Project. The initiative’s stated intention is to develop a system that is similar to Passport in what it offers, but that embraces open standards, interoperability, and a decentralized architecture — an approach meant to prevent online identity from being controlled by any one entity (whether that entity be a corporation or the government). But while their stated objective is an open standard, there has been no announcement that the eventual standard will be submitted to any governing body, which is the accepted practice for such a process. Moreover, it appears that Liberty is having difficulty agreeing on basic principles of governance regarding these standards. Offering a forum to facilitate the establishment of such principles, and to oversee the implementation of governance, could be an important service for the public interest sector to provide.

In the summer of 2002, Liberty Alliance published version 1.0 of its specifications document. The Liberty Alliance intends to create a system of federation that provides an unique identification to individuals, groups, organizations, applications, and devices — allowing them to maintain a persistent identity as they move between Web sites maintained by different, even competing, owners. A key part of this system is the idea of a "single sign-in." When visiting a participating Web site, you would be asked to authenticate your identity. Through use of a single sign-in, you will be able to maintain the same identity online as you surf from site to site within the federation, and make use of their services, without having to reenter passwords or logins. The verification of your identity, and the profile associated with it, will be maintained by a third party provider. So if you visit eBay, and sign-in to participate in an auction, the eBay site would be assured by a third party identity service that you are who say you are, and some aspect of your digital profile would be provided to eBay. Then, after purchasing that special sugar bowl that struck your fancy, and moving on to WebMD.com, you could enter a discussion area or the e-store immediately, without having to register. WebMD.com would receive verification of your identity from that same third party identity service, know who you are, and treat you accordingly.

At first it seemed that Passport and Liberty Alliance would go head to head in a brutal battle that would force the Web industry to choose between the two systems — potentially splitting the Internet into separate, competing identity camps with no interoperability between them. Recently, however, there have been whispers of compromise, and some possibility is emerging that Passport and Liberty might become interoperable at some level. Just as services like Cirrus and Star enable the ATMs of different banks to speak to one another (so you can withdraw cash from an ATM at a bank that is not your own), it appears that something similar might happen on the Internet regarding persistent identity.

However, because the public interest sector has been largely disengaged from this process, and has not been advocating a strong public commons position, standards are being written that may complicate the implementation of ASN-type functionality in the future. Because of a lack of access to the forums where these decisions are being made, we simply do not know.

Liberty’s architecture calls for a variety of identity providers from whom consumers could choose, depending on personal needs and proclivities. Their intent is to create a market for online identity, just there is a market today for Web services (like online auction houses, stores, games, specialized information services, and newspapers). It is conceivable that the public interest sector could collaborate with one or several identity providers to develop digital profiles that reflect the needs of civil society, and not only those of business.

The not-for-profit initiative XNS.org has completed the first iteration of a civil society approach to building identity into the Internet’s architecture. This work show great promise. In 2002, XNS.org worked with members of the standards body OASIS [6] to form a technical committee so they could agree on, discuss, and publish a standard for persistent identity and related data exchange. A specification for the persistent identity standard was published in 2002, and is now making its way through the OASIS approval system. A related specification for data-exchange, using the Security Assertion Markup Language, or SAML, is being developed following the same procedures, with an eye toward ultimate ratification by OASIS. However, as encouraging as this effort appears to be, it is being undertaken with extremely limited resources, with little involvement by the broader civil society community. Without active participation and support from the public interest sector, even if XNS.org can complete the ratification process of a set of core standards (which is likely), it is an open question whether these standards would ever achieve widespread adoption.

Building your online identity

Underlying this report is the assumption that every individual ought to have the right to control his or her own online identity. You should be able to decide what information about yourself is collected as part of your digital profile, and of that information, who has access to different aspects of it. Certainly, you should be able to read the complete contents of your own digital profile at any time. An online identity should be maintained as a capability that gives the user many forms of control. Without flexible access and control, trust in the system of federated network identity will be minimal.

Both Liberty Alliance and Passport claim that every user will have some measure of control over their digital profile. However, until the final specifications for these systems are published and analyzed, the true degree of user control will remain unknown. Regardless of their claims, civil libertarians have reason to be suspicious of both Liberty and Passport, because the entire project of federated network identity did not begin within a civil society context, but rather was born among businesspeople seeking to maximize profits. To date, online identity is treated the same way as an individual’s credit history — as information that exists as a result of commercial transactions, and so is the proprietary data of the company that captures it. These companies then have the legal right to do with this data as they see fit, including making it available to massive databases that centralize this information for resale. At the same time, your rights as a citizen to access and effect this same information are limited — as anyone who has ever had to sort out errors in his official credit history can attest.

A digital profile is not treated as the formal extension of the person it represents. But if this crucial data about you is not owned by you, what right do you have to manage its use? At the moment, it seems, this right would have to be granted by the corporations that have captured your data for their own purposes. They may perhaps choose to give you a measure of control over what they do with it. But as long it is their choice to grant you control, rather than your right as a citizen to assert control, the potential for abuse is of grave concern. Just as overly burdensome intellectual property laws threaten to dampen innovation on the Internet, as Lawrence Lessig has described, legacy twentieth century laws regarding proprietary information about "customers" could undermine efforts to create a civil society-oriented persistent identity. This could, in turn, strictly limit the forms of trusted relationships that might take place online.

The digital profiles that Internet stores like Amazon have developed of their customers follow a common pattern. Have you ever seen the information about your sales history that Amazon bases its personal recommendations on? Not to suggest that Amazon is a nefarious organization, or that it uses what it learns about customers in an improper way. But you cannot gain access to your Amazon profile, even if you wanted to. Nor do you even have the right to ask for it. Today, for most people, this does not pose a problem. Most of us are glad to get Amazon’s recommendations (sometimes they are even useful). But a decade hence, as the tools for creating online profiles become far more sophisticated, and stores like Amazon cross-reference their proprietary customer information with that of thousands of other companies, we will be in a very different territory.

Let’s take a moment to consider the ways that data about you can be gathered and entered into a digital profile. There are basically three:

First, as with the Amazon example, your online decisions can be traced, entered into a database, and interpreted according to a pre-determined algorithm. This form of automated information gathering, by compiling a database of significant actions, is the most unobtrusive way to build a profile. At the same time, you — the profile subject — may be unaware that your actions are being followed and interpreted in this way. It is important that ethical standards are established so that you know when your behavior is being tracked, and when it isn’t. Moreover, you should be aware who is tracking your behavior, and what they will do with that information. Most importantly, you should always be given the option to not have your behavior tracked — this option should be a fundamental right in a free society. By tracked we mean the recording and retention of activity that is retained beyond a certain time limit, transferred to others, and/or retained for future use.

Secondly, you can deliberately enter information about yourself into a digital profile. For example, some online communities have complex registration forms that each new member must fill out in order to participate. Once a member makes clear that she prefers Bob Dylan and Tom Waits to N’Synch and Britiney Spears, she is then led into an online discussion area with others who expressed similar interests. The advantage to profiles compiled like this is that you know exactly what you have chosen to express about yourself, and what you have not. The downside, however, is that filling out forms is cumbersome; most of us prefer to avoid doing it.

The third method is perhaps the most traditional form of information gathering, and least preferred: Having others report on your actions without your knowledge. Depending on who controls your digital profile, and how it is used, this method might play a minimal role in federated network identity, or it might be central to it. The more control each individual has over his or her own profile, however, the less likely it is that undesirable or unnecessary reports by others will be a key element. A user should have some ability to determine under what circumstances other people’s opinions about his actions might precede him when he enters new situations.

Again, ethical standards need to be agreed to that protect citizens against abuses of this kind, which the technology could easily facilitate.

The identity providers called for in the Liberty Alliance specification would design databases to collect and sort data related to each digital profile, using the data captured in one of these three ways. As Liberty Alliance and Passport documentation suggest, most of their resources will go toward the capture and distribution of information about you that relates to your behavior as a consumer. They give little regard to information that could enhance your behavior as a citizen. (While the specifications might not preclude non-commercial implementations, the resources given to them will be meager at best.) Of course, these systems are not deliberately designed to limit your actions online to consumer-type behavior. There is no conspiracy of nefarious companies who, behind locked doors, scheme to reduce the Internet to nothing more than a vast, digital Wal-Mart. But because no resources are being given to develop parallel systems, or augment the ones under development, civil society online may well be at risk.

Obviously, if participating Web sites do not request or capture certain kinds of information about you, that data will not become part of your digital profile. As digital profiles become a central component that shape how you engage with the online world — a trend likely to grow only more pronounced over time — if your digital profile does not include certain appropriate information about you, it would lead to a reduced ability to fully express yourself on the Internet. If digital profiles are not designed to support the needs of civil society, then it will not be possible to develop web services that might make use of that data — and an entire territory of potential online behavior will go untapped.

Once we accept that each person should have the right to control the contents of his or her digital profile, we need to ask: What kinds of data should be included as part of it? What information about you could significantly enhance your online interactions? What data in your digital profile would make it possible for you to more easily find relevant media, and to connect with others with whom you share affinities? By its very nature, this type of information may be deeply personal. We are not used to reducing our interests and relationships to a list, to a recitation of topics and names. But if a carefully considered, narrowly focused expression of these aspects of ourselves could be designed, and if the distribution of that information could be used to enhance our online experience, wouldn’t we want to use it?

For the moment, let’s put aside questions about security and spam, both of which are significant (and are addressed below). Suppose that your digital profile could include data about your special interests — for example, that you are specialist in solar energy technology. The profile would need to say more than that you are a consumer of solar cells (though you might be), because you have a deeper knowledge than most people who simply purchase a solar energy product. This is where the current plans for federated network identity fall short, because they focus so narrowly on financial transactions. Being a specialist may coincide with being a consumer, but of course the difference between the two is vast.

Affinity and trusted third parties

The foundation for any interoperability between distinct Web services (including online communities, e-stores, and media distribution sites) that supports civil society is a form of persistent identity that each citizen can maintain for his or herself in accordance with the rights guaranteed to individuals in a free society. Without this approach to persistent identity, a public interest initiative like the ASN is unthinkable.

But in addition to this fundamental approach to persistent identity, in order to bring about the ASN a specific functionality would have to be part of each digital profile: The ability to express affinities and capabilities, and to list or assist in the discovery of other trusted individuals who share these interests.

What would this entail? As a specialist in solar energy, you would have relationships with others in the solar energy field — some of whom might also be specialists, some might be curious amateurs, and some who might simply be consumers. Suppose you could enter the affinities you share these people into your digital profile, so that this data added efficiency to how you communicate and share media with them. For instance, if you have a high opinion of the expertise of Jimmy, a solar energy specialist you met at a conference, then your digital profile could express your confidence in Jimmy’s opinions on solar issues. This expressed affinity could then automatically solicit information or media from Jimmy on your behalf, when he chooses to reach out to others in the solar energy field (as described earlier in Scenario 3). It would also be possible for Jimmy to provide an introduction between you and a third party, because your confidence in Jimmy gives him the ability to automatically give others direct access to you (as seen in Scenario 4).

Once digital profiles include expressed affinities, the potential for networking through the Internet around common interests becomes significant, because it is a simple technical matter to connect individuals to others based on their shared affinity with a third party. This form of networking could have great reach. Two degrees of separation could provide connections between thousands of people, and three degrees of separation could potentially link over one hundred thousand. In his book Linked: The New Science of Networks, Albert Laszlo-Barabasi discusses at length the contribution that the six degrees principle makes to the effectiveness of social networks. "Each of us is part of a large cluster, the worldwide social net, from which no one is left out," he writes. "We do not know everybody on this globe, but it is guaranteed that there is a path between any two of us in this web of people" [7]. Since 1973, when Mark Granovetter’s published his groundbreaking study, "The Strength of Weak Ties," [8] sociologists have examined how trust is conveyed through third parties, enabling individuals to gain access to needed information or resources that support the achievement of specific goals. With the ASN, for the first time the power of network computing across the Internet would be applied deliberately to support this process of social networking in a civil society.

Earlier we defined the technical strategy of the ASN this way: To enhance the power of social networks by using interactive digital media to exploit the transitive nature of trust through the principle of six degrees of connection. The purpose of the ASN is to enable connections based on shared affinities and compatible capabilities to occur across the borders of distinct social networks. The ASN will improve the efficiency and effectiveness of citizens to share information and self-organize through the tactical use of digital media.

Such a system is based on the principle of "trusted third parties." Here is a simple example of how "trusted third parties" will work online: Both Bob and Nancy know Alice. While Bob and Nancy do not know each other, they both express an affinity with Alice about a particular subject — safe energy. That affinity is entered deliberately as part of their digital profiles. This expressed affinity confers the capability to Bob to conduct automated transactions with Nancy (who he does not know) about safe energy related issues. In practice, each of the "trusted third party" entities could be larger aggregates of individuals, such as organizations or businesses. Or they could be software agents, which implement various contracts and services. In an open, networked digital environment, like the Internet, the capabilities of this kind of transaction emerge as important as the transactions among the users become important.

Users of the ASN would need to maintain a list on their digital profile of those with whom they share affinities or complementary capabilities. This "affinity reference" might be entered into the digital profile directly by the user, or it could be automatically deduced by software that interprets behavior (for example, exchanging e-mail with the same person five times a day about a particular topic might automatically generate an "affinity reference"). There are many ways such "affinity references" could be collected by an identity provider, depending on the kinds of Web services that emerge to make use of them. Suffice it to say that, as long as the user can determine the specific content related to affinities kept in his or her digital profile, and can decide when and how that data is to be used, the potential of digital media to enhance trusted interactions between third parties is tremendous.

The "affinity reference" would be designed so that automated agents or third party brokers are able to access this data, allowing them to provide relevant introductions between individuals, or to facilitate the forwarding of media or messages based on expressed affinities. In effect, the system would allow for expressions of trust between participants to be transferred to third parties. But trust between people is a subtle, complicated form of interaction. There is no simple way to characterize trust relationships, no one-size-fits-all system that can adequately represent in the digital realm the variety of trust relationships that occur between people in the real world.

The type of "trust" referred to here is not meant to represent all the nuances of trust in real life. Rather, the ASN requires that the "affinity reference" only refer to a particular person in regard to a narrowly defined topic. Using the Alice-Bob-Nancy example above, the "affinity reference" between them might only apply to the issue of safe energy — and to nothing else. While digital profiles could enable the user to include "affinity references" about many people in a multitude of situations, most likely they would be used only for purposes with tightly constrained boundaries. The technology requires such constraints in order for it to be a practical tool.

Still, it is important that the ASN approximate a range of circumstances in which trust between people is articulated and extended. To do so, the ASN will need to offer several different kinds of affinity-based interactions. Some might be fully automated, as in the case of less valuable or less sensitive relationships. But in instances when personal relationships are highly prized and carefully guarded, though still available through the ASN, an automated introduction system would not be advisable. In these cases, ASN users would engage a third party brokering service to carefully analyze potential affinity or complementary capability matches, and provide a brokered introduction. (Brokering services are discussed below.) To facilitate this variety of interactions, a set of "introduction protocols" will need to be written and adopted.

Trusted transactions within an ASN system would range widely in value, which means that the system has to be built to accommodate a wide range of risk. Certainly, the technology underlying the system must have the confidence of its users. It needs to be robust enough to scale up in order to meet the demands that greater risk requires from it. While this challenge can be addressed in many ways, our preference is to use a distributed and decentralized architecture that decreases the possibility of a technical failure at a centralized location — and so increases the reliability, robustness, and trustworthiness of the system overall. In addition, the system’s technical architecture ought to be designed in a manner that allows for independent verifiability and certification at all levels. This means that all the technical services that participate in making the system function are able to verify that it meets its design goals. For that reason, the design should be simple, because complex systems, with millions of lines of code, are difficult to read — which effectively makes verification impossible.

Security

After reading the previous section, you may be thinking: "I’d never enter my personal relationships and the level of trust I have in them into an online database, because it could get hacked. How can I risk putting that kind of information into a system that isn’t 100 percent secure? The Internet is famously risky when it comes to keeping information private."

The security of information online is one of the hot topics of the digital communications field. Magazines are devoted to it, library shelves are packed with books about it, debates rage on the Web about the relative worth of competing approaches, and large sums of money are flowing from corporate and government coffers to pay for technology that promises to make their data more secure. But despite all the effort, no foolproof form of security has yet emerged. And it likely never will.

Nonetheless, the digitization of highly sensitive data continues apace. Why? Because these major institutions have come to feel that their data, while not 100 percent protected, is safe within an acceptable level of risk. Just as no bank can ever guarantee that it will never be robbed, and no business person can be certain that every signed contract will be fulfilled, it is an acknowledged fact of life that servers might on occasion be breached, that data could conceivably fall into the wrong hands. But the level of risk is no greater in the digital realm than it is the material world — where you take a risk each time you hand your credit card to a waiter. As long as precautions are followed, and resources are put toward the protection of data, in most cases illegal activity can be prevented.

The wheels are already in motion to digitize some of the most sensitive personal information imaginable — including your finances, work history, and health care records. The security protecting these databases may not be infallible, but it is pretty good. "Pretty Good Privacy," in fact, is the name of one of leading encryption standards. The notion behind it is that, as long as you can be assured that your information is being reasonably protected, you should be able to feel confidence in the system.

Certainly, everyone needs to maintain a vigilance regarding the security of their personal data. This will be one of the touchstone civil rights issues of the digital era — who gets to know what about you, and how is it protected. At the same time, as mentioned above, it does little good for progressives to respond to this situation by affecting a Luddite position, using a twentieth century model for "official identity" ("less is more") as the guide for policy in the twenty-first. Today’s Internet security is reliable enough to support a working system of federated network identity. Online identity will become an ubiquitous part of daily life. The greatest danger to civil society is not that the data associated with digital profiles is open to theft and illegal activity, but rather the real possibility that a system of federated network identity that erodes civil liberties and the public commons comes into being — while following the letter of the law.

That is why it is so important to put forward a progressive vision of online identity, and to promote projects that strengthen the public commons on the Internet, like the Augmented Social Network. Without that positive, forward thinking agenda, when it comes to the Internet, civil society groups are left with little else to pursue than defensive, rearguard actions.

Persistent identity and the ASN

A civil society approach to persistent identity is a cornerstone of the Augmented Social Network project. Without it, the ASN is hard to imagine — because for the ASN to work, you must be able to find other people online based on their expressed interests and affinities, and to choose your level of engagement with them based on their reputation, which means that a record musts be kept of their relevant past actions. The ASN requires a technical system to provide this functionality.

In life, we enter into social networks either because we are attracted to the ideas and activities at the center of a particular group, or we are introduced into the group by someone we know. The intent of the ASN is to bring an appropriate level of automation to this process, to make it more efficient and effective — particularly when it comes to narrowly defined interests and projects. Today, many of us feel that the mainstream media is poorly equipped to provide us with the news and information we need to be effective citizens. At the same time, while we cognitively grasp the effect that globalization has on our lives, and the increasing interconnectedness between people from all parts of the globe, our tools for acting as citizens on this understanding are poor. Though the business world has created exceptional tools for acting globally (so that a decision made in a Cleveland boardroom can redirect activity at a Bangalore factory in a micro-second — or vise versa), for individuals it is much more difficult to make efficient cross-border connections and to organize. The efficiencies in communications that digital technology have brought to large institutions should also be made available to citizens participating in the public commons. A civil society approach to federated network identity would provide the underpinnings necessary for the kinds of interactions that would strengthen the public commons. The ASN is one system that would take advantage of the civil society data in a digital profile — but there could conceivably be many others.

As mentioned above, the essential technical components of such a system are already being designed and implemented to pave the way for federated network identity. The latest indications suggest that, broadly speaking, the Liberty Alliance and Passport initiatives could support the kind of persistent identity required by the ASN — though there is no guarantee of this if civil society organizations are not represented at the table when key issues about technical architecture are being decided. Certainly, the specific needs of the public commons are not being written into the specifications of federated network identity. These specifications do not seem to disallow non-commercial requirements. But without a dedicated public interest effort to address this issue, we cannot be sure what the final draft of the specifications will call for.

Enhancements to online community infrastructures

Creating value through the network effect

Social networks have become a hot topic in the communications field. Theorists as diverse as Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Duncan Watts, Mark Granovetter, Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Johnson, and Manuel Castells have explored the emergent properties of group behavior in social networks. Many of them use the popular notion of "six degrees of separation" to demonstrate the ability of loose, informal networks to catalyze complex forms of social organization. The ASN is an attempt to deliberately apply the six degrees principle to online relationships, across traditional borders, in the public interest.

In his book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, Howard Rheingold describes the potential of digital communications to catalyze new forms of cooperation:

"The most profoundly transformative potential of connecting human social proclivities to the efficiency of information technologies is the chance to do new things together, the potential for cooperating on scales and in ways never before possible. Limiting factors in the growth of human social arrangements have always been overcome by the ability to cooperate on larger scales: the emergence of agriculture ten thousand years ago, the origin of the alphabet five thousand years ago, the development of science, the nation-state, the telegraph in recent centuries, did more than accelerate the pace of life and make it possible for the human population to expand. These cultural levers also enlarged the scale of cooperation, radically altering the way people live." [9]

Rheingold raises the possibility that mobile and pervasive digital media might lead to "breakouts of cooperation [that] could expand liberty" [10] But can the Internet really be effective in this way? Lessons from recent years suggest that it could.

Peer-to-peer networks, like Napster (for file sharing) and IGC (for instant messaging), gave us glimpses of how direct communication between members of an online community expands connection-making and information sharing. These are examples of a phenomenon that has come to be known at the "Network Effect." Robert Metcalfe, who led the team that invented Ethernet, noticed the Network Effect in the early days of wired computing, and distilled this observation into "Metcalfe's Law" [