preface
When I served as CIO for the State of Utah in 2001, I noticed something surprising: almost every problem that landed on my desk had an identity component. Consolidating directories so every state employee could have a utah.gov email address. Moving the state’s website to a new domain. Even routine issues that seemed unrelated to identity turned out to hinge on knowing who someone was and what they were allowed to do. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that observation would shape the next two decades of my career.
In 2004, a seminal podcast by Steve Gillmor brought together a group of people passionate about digital identity, which became known as the Identity Gang. I was teaching at BYU and working on reputation systems, which are rooted in identity. Doc Searls, Kaliya Young, and I decided the conversation needed to continue, so we created the Internet Identity Workshop. IIW has now met 42 times and remains the place where the identity community tackles its hardest problems together. Around the same time, a good friend, Doug Kaye, told me the world needed a book on digital identity and that I should write it. That became Digital Identity, published by O’Reilly in 2005, which focused on helping enterprises build identity strategies.