Mike Jones: self-issued

I was surprised and deeply honored to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from Kuppinger Cole at EIC 2023. As I recalled when accepting the award, when Kim Cameron received the same award about a decade ago, he said from the podium “No, don’t do this! My career isn’t over! I’m not done contributing!” Kim always had a wicked wit. ;-)

Coincidentally, I described some of the achievements that led to the award during my keynote Touchstones Along My Identity Journey. After a couple of times of me saying “We won an award for that” during the keynote, I was amused that the audience would break out into laughter each subsequent time that I mentioned another award. Like this award, the audience’s reaction was unexpected and delightful.

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I had the distinct honor of being invited to give a keynote talk at EIC 2023. The result was Touchstones Along My Identity Journey. My talk abstract was:

In 2005, Kim Cameron excitedly told me about digital identity and set my life on a course to “Build the Internet’s missing identity layer”. In this talk I’ll tell key stories from my identity journey – stories of the people, ideas, and lessons learned along the way. I’ll speak of technology and collaboration, usability and business models, solving problems people actually have, and building new ecosystems. Come with me on this journey of exploration, trials, triumphs, and humor as I recount touchstones of the human endeavor that is digital identity.

Kuppinger Cole has posted a video of my keynote on YouTube. I was pleased with how well it went. After the first few sentences, I was in the zone! I hope many of you find the messages in the talk useful.

My slides are also available in (PowerPoint) and PDF.

Special thanks go to the OpenID Foundation for supporting my trip to EIC this year and to designer Alistair Kincaid at MATTR for helping me transcend my usual black-bulleted-text-on-a-white-background presentation style!

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In September 1982, artificial intelligence professor Scott Fahlman made a post on the Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Department “general” bboard inventing the original smiley :-). I remember thinking at the time when I read it “what a good idea!”. But in 2002 when I told friends about it, I couldn’t find Scott’s post online anywhere.

So in 2002, I led a computing archaeology expedition to restore his post. As described in my original post describing this accomplishment, after a significant effort to locate it, on September 10, 2002 the original post made by Scott Fahlman on CMU CS general bboard was retrieved by Jeff Baird from an October 1982 backup tape of the spice vax (cmu-750x). Here is Scott’s original post:

19-Sep-82 11:44    Scott E  Fahlman             :-)
From: Scott E  Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways.  Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends.  For this, use

:-(

I’m reposting this here now both to recommemorate the accomplishment nearly twenty years later, and because my page at Microsoft Research where it was originally posted is no longer available.

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