Come from Everywhere

Three Canadians—Kim Cameron, Kaliya “Identity Woman” Young, and Dick Hardt—at the Identity Gang meeting in Scottsdale, 20 March 2005

IIW, the Internet Identity Workshop, is the UN of identity. While located in the U.S., it has always represented and welcomed the whole world to work on global problems best addressed in person.

As it happens, IIW was born exactly twenty years ago tomorrow—20 March 2005—at Esther Dyson’s PC Forum in Scottsdale, Arizona. A group of eleven that called itself the Identity Gang gathered around a table there to plot what became (IMHO) the most leveraged conference in the world. Three of the eleven were Canadians. One (Esther) was born in Zurich. As for the rest, I suppose they could have been born anywhere. (I was born in the U.S., but half my ancestors were Swedish. Those on my father’s side were Irish, English, German, French, and God knows.)

All of the Internet’s protocols, from TCP/IP on up, were made to ignore national boundaries.  I am inviting participants in the next IIW (April 8 to 10) to do the same: ignore the noise coming from the U.S. government and come join us to work on what’s good for the whole connected world.

If you want to get away from wacky retro nationalism in tech, IIW is the place to do it.