Meg was absolutely right

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[Dave Birch] Some time back, the Minister for ID Cards Meg Hillier received some criticism for saying that the new ID card was just like a passport, but for use inside the country. In fact, I don’t think it would really be considered a breach of confidence to report that I once sat next to Meg at an event of some description, and she told me that she thought it had been an unfortunate turn of phrase.

Hillier is relatively new to the ID card brief at the Home Office, and has come up with several improbable and/or unfortunate claims in recent months (e.g., “we should see an identity card, like a passport, in country”)

[From Transcript disappears minister's 'hack-proof' ID register claim • The Register]

But actually, she was completely correct in saying this. In the UK, the ID card scheme was (for political, not engineering, reasons) given to the Passport Service. They produced an ID card that was — guess what — a passport. The UK ID cards that have been issued so far implement nothing other than the ICAO standard for e-passports with Extended Access Control (EAC). I’m not knocking the Passport Service. If the ID card had been given to the DVLA then it would have ended up looking like a driving licence and if it had been given to the DfT then it would have ended up with an ITSO shell on it. My point is not to criticise the implementation decisions made by the Home Office and their ID Development Partner, PA Consulting, but to call for a different debate about identity and a greater vision for national identity management for the future.

I’ll illustrate what i mean with one small example. The ID cards issued in the UK have a contact plate on them, but it is only for show, since there are no services accessible through the contact interface (for the technical, there is no Answer-to-Reset, or ATR). The cards implement the ICAO standard for e-passports and nothing more. The lovely gold square is a Potemkin Plate, only there to impress politicians. Meanwhile, in Germany, they are designing a card that implements online pseudonyms to support e-commerce and other such 21st-century functionality.

The Interior Ministry has confirmed that the introduction of the multi-function card will go ahead as planned on November 1, 2010.

[From Germany set to introduce smart ID Cards in 2010 | Science & Technology | Deutsche Welle | 15.12.2009]

Why are the Germans able to introduce a national ID card that does something useful, while we are not? Are we stupider than the Germans? I don’t believe that. We have worse programmers? Doubt it. It’s a mystery. Of course, it might be that their system is designed by engineers to meet a clear specification, whereas no-one really knows what ours is supposed to be for, but who knows.

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

Taking a Long View

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[Dave Birch] The always interesting Michael Mainelli of Z/Yen invited me along to the Long Finance Institute "do" in the City, where a number of people were talking about the long view of finance, another perspective on the "Long Now". I have to say first of all that it was a thoroughly enjoyable event. The basic question behind the long finance agenda is "how will we know when the financial system is working?". I know this sounds a bit vague, but the conversation, discussion and debate that it enables are very valuable, and it caused me to think about a number of the innovation-related discussions that I'm involved in. Some new thinking is always welcome.

I was particularly interested in the "eternal coin". An eternal coin? Here's the schtick. Would it be possible to design a coin that never loses it value? Could such a thing exist? If it could exist, what would it be made of? Thought provoking. They have a logo made from a Moebius strip, which I'm not sure about to be honest (although I treasure the souvenir one that they gave us), so rather than critcise I thought I'd try and come up with another one sometime. Sadly, I'm not terribly artistic, but I'm sure Brian Eno (that chap from "Question Time" — turns out he used to play piano in a popular beat combo) must know some, so perhaps it would be better to leave it to them. Michael said that the "eternal coin" is the iconic focus of the Long Finance project, analagous to the eternal clock of the Long Now Foundation, which I thought was a good description.

But back to Long Finance. They have mapped out eight themes within what they call a "meta commerce" structure:

  1. Long-term versus short-term, an obvious theme for finance, one I'll comment on later.
  2. Fiscal versus monetary.
  3. Free versus regulated. No-one believes that totally free markets are desireable (look at Somalia) but
  4. Selfish versus selfless. I am somewhat on the "greed is good" side of things, but clearly we act in ways that contribute to the long-term good.
  5. Mutual versus public-sector versus private-sector. I think this is quite a hot topic because of the banking crisis and I'm keen to hear to different opinions.
  6. Rational versus emotional. Financial markets may want to see themselves as entirely rational, but they have a herd mentality.
  7. Sustainability versus robustness versus resilience. For a long time, we lived sustainable lives in balance with nature. Of course, we only lived to 25 and had an infant mortality rate of 90%, but you can't have everything. What does long term sustainability even mean? In the long term the universe isn't sustainable. But I digress.
  8. Theory versus practice. It's not clear to me that we have a theory of finance for the next 10,000 years so we probably have to build on what we've got and try use the practical lessons learned so far.

Some of things that were discussed (such as "retirement cohorts") were genuinely fascinating, although I am absolutely not qualified to comment on whether they are mad or not. As I'm obsessed with thinking about the future of money and payments, this was a wonderful day out.

P.S. I loved the affectation of showing the date everywhere with five digits as 1st February 02010.

P.P.S. Would have loved to twitter, blog and otherwise big up the event from inside, but the wifi wasn't open. Tut tut.

P.P.P.S I thought the idea of having audience singalongs between the sessions was great, but I don't think we'll be bringng this innovation to the Digital Money Forum.

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.