Digital Identity NZ

This is an working group that's existed for about 7 months, made up of "industry leaders" (or aspiring leaders at least). From what I've heard it's slow moving, and many of the people involved are pretty backwards about being open and collaborating because trade secrets.

Anyway it's ticking along, and I've been ignoring it, but I think that's probably a mistake. What's got me fired up is reading about these upcoming events. (Fired up in a good way I think)

• Identity as Taonga August 26-27 (Kaye Maree Dunn from #ahau is MC!)
• Identity Summit : October 16

The first one is actually part of a series put on by Victoria University, so I'll reserve more judgement there.

Check out the details for the Summit though:

Why am I wound up?
This is a 2 day conference with a heft as fuck price tag. There's no apparent thought who this is being built for and how... .as in who is not in this room? Who is invited? Whose futures are we writing without consideration? (I've been doing some colonisation reading + diversity/ inclusion work and this has my hackles up).

To be fair I'm not perfect - I'm on a learning journey - but I'd like to think I'm trying to be engage these challenges a bit more.

cc some kiwis : @Maui (woah, bold name!) @mikey @piet @matt @alanna @Chelsea

Part of my fire around this topic started with me, as in "hey, where's the commons building voice at this table, where my p2p FOSS crew?". I went looking for how I could engage with corporate prices, and discovered that I wasn't the only one who was left off the invitation.
This took it from personally a bit annoyed to kinda more down the deeply troubling end of the spectrum. There's a chance this crew will be so ineffective they will not change anything (as I said their competition has already blocked them). What I'm worried about is the discourse and idea space being polluted with individual centric capitalistic perceptions of identity. If government hears that's the new cool thing and start paying people to build that, then we're missing a massive opportunity to have the definition of identity widened - this would work really well for Maori (as far as I understand), and I think it would also benefit pakeha a lot too.

cc @sam

Just had a call with @Nico, and he shared that India went through an interesting process around digital / national identity 3 years ago. cc @dinesh (in case you have any opinions you'd like to share?)

@mikey you said you were going to say things on this topic ... what were they?