Overview
SocialPhysics is an open collaborative project sponsored by Parity Communications.
The goal of SocialPhysics is to give people more control over their digital identities: their online identities, personal information and social relationships. The project, affiliated with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School, has two components:
- Open Source software development: Leadership of the Higgins Trust Framework project, a technology sub-project of the Eclipse Foundation. Higgins is a framework that enables users and enterprises to integrate identity, profile, and relationship information across multiple systems.
- Community development: We maintain SocialPhysics.org and Identity Gang.org, a peer community focused on user-centric identity; and lead IdentitySchemas.org, which is creating a web-based catalogue of identity-related ontologies (schemas) and its live implementation: the Community Dictionary Service (CDS). We also host the annual invitation only "Feb 9" Workshop and the SocialPhysics blog. We have a representative on the OSIS steering committee. Our goal is to foster dialogue that can help organize the efforts of many separate groups and individuals who share a common vision of user-empowerment. We also maintain Stuff We Like, a collection of multi-disciplinary issues research focused on the “physics” behind social interactions and the emergence of trust through various kinds of reciprocity and exchange as well as the legal and policy issues.
News
Technical Community and Industry Leaders announce formation of Information Card Foundation to Simplify Secure On-line Digital Identity. Meet the Founders at the Burton Group's Catalyst Conference in San Diego, Wednesday June 25, at 5:00 PM
Article on Identity crisis in Boston Globe
At a Crossroads: Personhood and Digital Identity in the Information Society published by the OECD. Kudos to Mary Rundle of the Berkman center for her great work
Upcoming Events
Catalyst 2008, June 23-27, San Diego
