Dick Hardt begins his talk with a brief overview of notions of identity and how that compares with what is actually required in an increasingly digitised world. According to Hardt, Identity 2.0 is definitely coming, but in what shape and delivered by what technologies remains unknown and unknowable at the moment.

Hardt differentiates Identity 1.0 from Identity 2.0 by describing the move from a directory centric environment where authentication means simply that your identity is registered on a web site's directory to a user centric environment where an identity can truly be applied to a variety of web sites. He believes this will happen because the recent history of technological initiatives shows that open and simple wins out.

The bulk of Hardt's talk comprises an examination of the possible drivers for this switch to Identity 2.0. He looks at the enterprise, at government, at banking, at consumers, and at the large portal sites to determine who has both motive and influence. His conclusion may be surprising.

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Dick Hardt is a pioneer in the internet sector and the open source software community. He has been active in software development for nearly two decades and his most recent venture, Sxip Identity, provides enterprise identity management solutions for on-demand applications seeking to exploit the power of Identity 2.0.

Before Sxip, Hardt founded ActiveState in 1997 and under his leadership as CEO it became a leader in open source programming languages and anti-spam software. ActiveState was acquired by UK-based software company Sophos in 2003.

Resources:

• Dick Hardt's blog
• The Sxip web site
• The Sxip corporate blog
• Kim Cameron's identity blog

This program is from the O'Reilly Open Source Convention held in Portland, Oregon August 1-5, 2005.

For Team ITC:

• Description editor: Graham Stewart
• Post-production audio engineer: George Hawthorne
• Series producer: Darusha Wehm