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Garden Route ID

I just landed back in George on Sunday and had a good rest yesterday morning. Yesterday afternoon I had a very interesting discussion with Greg Roodt of HandMade SoftWare.

There has been a lot said around the web the last few months about creating trust relationships, closed (non-anonymous groups) on the web as well as improving on the signal-to-noise ratio. We don't want to spend more time online, we want to spend quality time.

One of the things that have made the web great is the ability to be anonymous and have a certain level of freedom that isn't always accepted in society in general. However, along with this you also got a huge amount of abuse, especially by spammers and stalkers. These days, many people are starting to believe that anonymity is not everything in life and sometimes the ability to trust and be trusted is better.

Therefore, we are starting with our latest (local) initiative. For lack of a better name, I call it the Garden Route ID for the moment...

Essentially, this is the way I see it:

We have a website that allow users to log on, but not to register. We have a list of verifiers and their locations on the site. The user must go to one of the verifiers, who are generally trusted in the community, to physically identify themselves and show that they are a "real person". The verifier would take down their contact information (telephone number(s), physical address, etc) and allow them to choose a unique username together with a password.

After this, users can log in and update their own information as they need. However, being the Garden Route ID, they need to stay within the Garden Route area to continue to make use of the service.

The Garden Route ID site can then effectively function as an OpenID provider. If the user has a Garden Route ID account, you know they are part of the network and can probably be trusted. And if they generate abuse, it should be reasonably easy to track them down and/or remove their account and ban them out of joining back into the system.

There are cases where a third-party site might decide to allow only Garden Route ID "holders". There are also cases where it would simply be a single sign-on alternative. After all, the site is a full OpenID provider so it can be used for any OpenID enabled site. In some cases however it can even work in a kind of a "we'll give you special treatment if you have a Garden Route ID" scenario. You could get access to more services, quicker. For example, if you submit a classified ad or comment, instead of having to wait for it to be approved by the site administrator, it could be published immediately because you're now part of the "trusted" network.

There are benefits for everybody in this and I think it'll be a very interesting experiment. We will be holding a physical meeting about this in the next week or two but dates have yet to be confirmed. It is likely to be combined with some other stuff all in one evening, at least for the initial talks, but I'll publish the information here as it becomes available.

Posted by Charl van Niekerk on Tuesday, April 22, 2008
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1 Comments

Comment by Blogger Twobombs on Saturday, April 26, 2008 4:18:00 PM

Charl, you and Greg are, per usual, years and years ahead of the game. :)

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