Eugene Eric Kim
From Forge
Creator of Yoke. Principal and cofounder of Blue Oxen Associates.
[edit] Motivation for Creating Yoke
The primary motivation is simple and practical. I want to unify the account management for a bunch of different Web-based applications that Blue Oxen Associates hosts. Many of these tools are written in different languages.
I also want to support the Identity Commons principle of enabling users to control their Digital Identity.
One day, we may live in a world where Identity Brokers abound, service providers we trust to "hold" our digital identities, just as we trust banks today to hold our money. In that world, applications hosted anywhere could interact with any of those Identity Brokers. Service Providers could delegate identity management to these i-brokers.
That day may come soon. But it's not here today. And twiddling our thumbs won't make it come sooner.
One thing I realized after working with Identity Commons over the past two years is that communities who want to adopt these technologies now will need to be their own Identity Brokers. The ASP model isn't viable for these early adopters, because the technology is too immature not to have full control over them. For example, the usability challenges of getting users to understand why they're being redirected to another site to login are enormous, especially in these days of mass phishing. I can't depend on a third party to respond as rapidly as I'll need them to respond in order to provide a useful service.
Another thing I observed was that the problems are complex, and if we try to tackle all of these problems all at once, we'll never get anything done. We need to approach the problem in an evolutionary way, solving small, concrete problems in parallel, identifying and incorporating the solutions that work, and iterating rapidly.
Yoke is my response to these needs and observations. Not only does it solve an immediate, concrete problem, it is being built in a way that strongly emphasizes rapid iterations, designing to evolve, and community development.
