The DTI event on 9 July gives us six weeks to get our heads clear about the salient hard questions facing the UK about ID in an e-enabled society.

There is plenty going on and plenty being said in every community involved. Policemen are standing up and challenging the government (also here); prompted by the ICO Parliament is reviewing the whole area; companies such as Sun, Microsoft and Google have trenchant and unresolved views, after the Home Office’s undignified firefight with the LSE HM Treasury (which has the clout to pay the bills) is revisiting all the sums in the cold light of day. Meanwhile the IPS has a job to get on with, and banks are quietly dumping liability onto their customers, who find no-one is interested in helping them.

The trouble is, in a phrase I heard Nick Bohm use, the assertions from these different communities pass through one another like angry ghosts in the night. What we need to do is connect these entrenched communities to make a conversation. It will be very hard, but rewarding.

I think the technical community is making the most rapid progress in its thinking. I can’t keep up; I’ve over 1400 unread emails in my “identity workshop” list. But crucially it has learned the lesson that identity services must be user-controlled, intuitive and easy to use. My primer for the key contempory issues and developments we need to get our heads round here might include:

Liberty Alliance - home page here, , Wikipedia entry here, created in shocked reaction to Microsoft’s clumsy centralist Hailstorm plan it offers standards and guidelines for federated identity management.

Kim Cameron who is leading Microsoft’s in-house campaign for enlightenment on this issue. His blog is here and his seven laws of ID are here

Stefan Brands, a Dutch cryptographer based in Montreal hardwired for protection of privacy and human dignity. He sits patiently on answers to the key ID questions the world is not yet even asking. His company is Credentica and his blog is here.

Jeff Jonas, the Vegas-based software entrepreneur (now part of IBM) and highly effective sleuth who is now seeing the light about the implications of such work for human dignity and privacy. His blog is here.

and finally Ben Laurie of Google who understands all this stuff. Splendidly sceptical, I place Ben in that tradition of cussed British non-conformism in which our good decisions have always been rooted. His blog is here and his current three laws of ID are here.

Government folk please note: when these technical people talk of “laws” they’re exploring principles that work technically and socially. They’re not trying to do you out of your job of drafting legislation. Please be patient and understand what they’re trying to say.

Technical folk please note: government folk get phreaked out if you say you’re drafting laws, just like you do when they try to legislate about IT.

That’s my starter anyway. Glad to hear of other people’s.