[MG] Authentication (was: Pollserver Federation - Crosstalk between voting systems)

[Thomas von der Elbe]

Am 05.01.2011 22:11, schrieb Alex Rollin:
>
>> That is a *very* serious problem in my perspective which has been tackled
>> by Mike with a streetwiki/trust-network approach already.
> I am aware of this approach and I find it to be inadequate to my needs
> and use case as my polity crosses extended geographic territory.
>
Ah, I haven't thought of that yet, but I guess you are right: It will be 
hard to proove with the means of the trust-network, that you are an 
US-citizen living outside the US but still are elegible to vote on 
US-issues.

And yes, the trust-network will bring the better results the more people 
join in a given geographic area. In your use case of collaborativly 
steering a cooperative, the just few members can live all across the 
city or even the country, so it wont work.

So yes, for that an authority based (3rd party) authentacation is better 
(if every member trusts this authority). But for large scale democracy, 
I guess, this authority could only be the government. But then countires 
like Somalia would be excluded from e-dem ... so we do need the 
trust-network in the end anyway.

> I am going to be implementing some form of process for identification
> verification within my own system that will be open to third party
> verification of some form.  This will make me an "admin" of this type,
> and a "central authority."  A standard is the key to spreading this
> power out, though, as I am not interesting in monopolizing identity
> verification, and I don't think a monopoly serves anyone.

Yes, imo many different authentication systems can work side by side for 
different users and even for the same user ... if in the end everybody 
is able to filter the voting-results in regard to the used 
authentication method, e.g. filter out all the votes authenticated only 
by the Somalian government.

Thomas
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://metagovernment.org/pipermail/start_metagovernment.org/attachments/20110106/75fabfcb/attachment.html>


Originally posted to the mailing list of the Metagovernment Project:
http://metagovernment.org/mailman/listinfo/start_metagovernment.org