Kim Cameron, Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect of AD at Microsoft as well as author of the Seven Laws of Identity impressed the crowd today at the Defrag 2009 Conference.

His session, “Identity as a Collaborative Foundation” began with the preface, “How are we recognized in different contexts?”

  1. Foundation for personalization
  2. The social mouse/keyboard
  3. Foundation for collaboration and social phenomena
  4. I can’t collaboration over time if I can’t recognize and refer to you

Mr. Cameron recognized a need to traverse silos and contextual separation because each person has a mosaic of identities. The architectural problem? The Internet is not designed with any way to know who you’re connected to and really, it’s “a patchwork quilt of kludges”.

Ideally, an identity metasystem would be created, with no vendorship, based on choices, where the user could see aspects of her digital life in a holistic way in order to promote user understanding, control and privacy.

So what would a claims-based model look like? It would include an abstraction layer for authentication, authorizing obtaining information about users devices and services. The balance would be the fine line between too much administration effort and not enough.

Mr. Cameron declared the pieces needed to implement this model could be reduced to three: framework, server, and information card selector. He added an AD federation service should work in the cloud.

Mr. Cameron closed his session with comments on the consumer space. Big and small service providers can support it with minimal disclosure tokens.

The Defrag 2009 Conference concludes today in Denver, Colorado.