"The Laws" from Digital ID World

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At Digital ID World, Kim Cameron proposed the Laws of Identity, which quite frankly are on the edge of what I'm able to understand about digital identity (which is part of what fascinates me about hearing Kim talk about them). There are, however, three things that I clearly understood:
  1. Kim is not stating these as the sole authority, but rather as someone whose expertise arises out of his conversations with others, and using the "laws" to "provide a way for people new to the identity discussion to understand its central issues. This lets them actively join in, rather than everyone having to restart the whole discussion from scratch."
  2. A comparison to the laws of physics... that while not everybody understands the laws of gravity, the laws of gravity still apply to everyone, even if they don't understand them. The laws of digital identity are a bit like that.
  3. While the laws of physics have a long, rich history of development, the laws of identity in the digital space are rapidly emerging along with the technologies of identity... and it's fascinating to watch the conversation as they emerge.

The other set of laws that were proposed came from Doc Searls, who has closed each of the Digital ID World Conferences (2003, 2004). My favorite, and perhaps the most generally understandable law, was Doc's lead-in (first) law proposed, "The Law of Somebody You Never Heard of in the Whole World Changing the World Right Under Your Ass"... the example Doc used was Wikipedia changing the rules on Encyclopedia Brittanica. And now it's not just Wikipedia, but Wikimedia. As of today, there are 577,798 articles in Wikipedia and rapidly growing (while Compton's Encyclopedia Brittanica advertises that its, "More than 37,000 articles cover geography, math, people, social studies, science, and more.") Functionally, what this means is that if you want a simple explanation of what Digital Identity is, see the "Digital Identity" entry in Wikipedia, because I don't think you'll find it in the more traditional source.

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