As this event is getting closer to hand, I am reposting William’s discussion of it from last month.

Update: You can now register online by clicking here, or here or by emailing the rather miraculous Susan Pickrell at susan.pickrell@kable.co.uk.

What are the essential unanswered questions for the UK about ID infrastructure, government’s role and its effect on business and consumers? What are the opportunities for unlocking value, wealth creation, efficiency and what are the threats to privacy and public trust?

The DTI is planning a get-together to start the process of looking at this on 9 July. There are important questions still out there, and DTI has allocated £10m for research projects to look into them to get answers starting from the autumn.

This isn’t a re-run of the ID card policy debate. We live in a democracy, Parliament has spoken, and those who want Parliament to speak again and say something different next time have to go through those channels. That’s Home Office/IPS’s patch anyway, and they are co-sponsors of the get-together. So the approach is, taking the work of IPS as a given in this landscape, what are the great known unknowns, including areas like privacy and consent.

Let’s go into the ID-enabled future with our eyes open. DTI will particularly welcome attendance at this event from people interested in undertaking the research work.

If you’re interested in coming email your details to editor [at] blindside .org.uk for now; online registration will be available soon.

The Foreign Office building in Berlin is a great place to reflect on big things that can go wrong in life. At first sight modern, it’s substantial and reassuring with solid panelling and tall, thick doors on vast hinges. It was built in 1934 and served the Nazis as Reichsbank HQ and the Communists as party HQ. A useful reminder how badly wrong things can go, and that we have to do what we can to prevent it.

Earlier this month we met there to talk not about totalinarianism but document exchange formats. Europe doesn’t like the economic effects of a proprietary monopoly, and fears its culture will be locked up the whim of suppliers. Pragmatists, often from Microsoft, which is pretty happy with the de facto standards situation in electronic office documents, argue that existing industry standards should be made open and accepted not imposed by do-gooders. Or as Jerry Fishenden puts it

Interoperability has always been about the practicalities of getting real, existing systems working with each other. It has always involved both de jure and de facto standards, new and old systems and those that have implemented different iterations of the same standard.

Jerry speaks a lot of sense. Jerry speaks for Microsoft. Does the freedom-loving open-source community (once denounced by a US Microsoft exec as “Unamerican”) find these two statements compatible? Here anyway is the declaration the EU group came up with in that remarkable building on 1 March:

There was strong consensus among Member State administrations on

• the necessity to use ODEF
• on “openness” being the basic criteria of ODEF
• and resulting requirements towards industry players / consequences for public administrations
• There is a general dissatisfaction with the perspective of having competing standards;
• One format for one purpose: Administrations should be able to standardize (internally) on a minimal set of formats;
• No incomplete implementations, no proprietary extensions;
• Products should support all relevant standards and standards used should be supported by multiple products;
• Conformance testing and document validation possibilities are needed in order to facilitate mapping / conversion;
• Handle the legacy / safeguard accessibility

See Blindside wiki on computing monoculture and if you know better please edit it.