"how do you get people to have and keep key pairs?"

I was watching a rather great talk yesterday from the web foundation 
board [1] ("Sir Tim and Gordon Brown: How Can the Web Accelerate Social 
and Economic Change?" - highly recommended!) where TimBL briefly touched 
on accountability and web of trust, and he made an interesting point, 
that from a technology standpoint the web of trust is of course possible 
in many different ways, but the biggest hold up is in the domain of 
sociology, namely "how do you get people to have and keep key pairs?".

I've thought about this many times in the past, but perhaps not given it 
enough weight in terms of the social benefits to the web population 
before.. WebID is probably the easiest and most effective way to get 
people to have and keep key pairs, and it appears to me that this could 
well be WebIDs most endearing and long lived feature.

Probably worth some focus time..

[1] http://vimeo.com/22106148
   * first 10 minutes are in french, the remainder in english.

Best,

Nathan

Received on Monday, 18 April 2011 09:53:43 UTC