I means to end "Means and Ends"

No not really. I find myself in an interesting 18th-century conversation with Jamie Lewis, of Burton Group. It's 18th-century in the sense that months and months pass between responses in the conversation, which is unusual in the warp-speed world. How I find myself here is via a little vanity-surfing on Google that turned up a blog post of Jamies' from February which was a response to a paper I'd written a while before called "Digital Identity Religion and Information Dogma." The paper itself was not so much a response as an extension to Jamies' thoughts in his own paper, "Means and Ends: Identity it Two Worlds." If I'd known about this earlier, it would have made great conversation at Digital ID World, in SF, in May. But I didn't. Anyway . . .

In his post, Jamie says,

Grayson seems to have gathered from "Ends and Means" that I think the "consumerist and corporatist views" of identity management "shall meet eventually in some state of balanced dissatisfaction." My point in that piece, though, was to make the point I've made in other places: that one size does not fit all, that both sides need to do what fits their needs, and that need a metasystem that will allow them not to just co-exist, but to interoperate as needed. To me, that's not a "state of balanced dissatisfaction," but one of appropriate balance and enablement.

I'm now merely here to assure one and all that I do agree with Jamie -- was inspired, in fact. His words above in explaining his meaning require no response from me. More important though, I want to assure you that "state of balanced of dissatisfaction" seemed like a nice turn of phrase. It is also, I think, an honest projection of likely outcome. It almost has to be when there are competing interests that meet in the middle: everyone is satisfied, it's true, but they have to be a little dissatisfied as well. Glass half-full -- glass half-empty. It shouldn't change the message.

The operative words in the phrase start just prior to my self-referential quote: shall meet. They will meet and they will give and take on both sides. There will be balance, and it will be contextual and driven by unique needs and circumstances. Those are the ends. The means are systems that can be applied in multiple contexts.

More pointedly, having now re-read my essay, I think that the underlying thrust of what I was trying to say (Roughly that the way we all see (personal) information informs how we will deal with it, and, since there are dramatically different understandings of that information -- who "owns" it, etc. -- resolving the digital identity systems may be more persistently tricky than we anticipate. So, we might be well advised to at least bring out into the open this critical underlying -- one might say "structural" -- premise.) remains largely unaddressed and unresolved at large within the so-called discussion.

To you.

Posted by Grayson at July 28, 2005 07:43 AM