kaliya

Digital Death Day Europe 2011 - Success

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Nov 132011

We had a small but engaging group for Digital Death Day Europe 2011 on Nov 11th in Amsterdam. We were lucky enough that a the owner of a funeral service joined us along with students, professors, people building online services focused this area and privacy advocates.

It was held in the Tropenmuseum (Museum of the Tropics) that has an exhibit on currently called Death Matters. The exhibit is very moving and covering many different aspects of death and how it is celebrated around the world.

We will have photos and notes up soon. Sessions included:

Live online after you die. A conversation about the possibilities and ethics of this
combined with: Archives of the Self and Digital Heritage: What is the future of our Data.
Sharing passwords?
There will be a next facebook – so your digital data life is at risk.
We think about “identities” online, but in mourning/remembering there seems to be a concept of “personality” or “essence” How does this translate online/digitally?
Personal Data Stores & Services along with the Locker Project
“Manage” data for people “inbetween” Life and death with diseses etc.
What should a deceased person/”user” be able to “do” within the functionality of an online account? (new relationships “friending”?, what gets frozen, etcetera..)
(Why) does the internet lend itself to the idea of the immaterial and therefor a medium to the dead? (Does technology facilitate this?).

One of the outcomes is going to be to outline the possibility of a special kind of OAuth token that companies that provide people services online “post life” could use to interact with these services. The community of companies that provides services in this area are all on our list - SUBSCRIBE HERE

The current practice of such services is to ask for a list of all the sites you use/have accounts with and some of them go so far as to ask you for your password – how ever when you die, you might have changed the password.

Digital Death Day Europe 2011

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Oct 012011

photo by Tomas Valenzula Blejer

Digital Death Day 2011 Europe will be November 11, 2011.

9am to 4:30 at the TropenMuseum

Registration IS Open.

BEAUTIFUL LONG FORM INVITATION

DEATH IS A PART OF LIFE AND LIFE HAS (TO AN EXTENT) BECOME DIGITAL.
Our increasing digitality means that we will increasingly be forced to come FACE to SCREEN with the various dimensions and complexities of Digital Death.
Held in the inspiring setting of the Tropenmuseum’s exhibition Death Matters, this conference will be primarily concerned with provoking discourse around the social, cultural and practical implications of Death in the Digital world.
Thus stimulating a reconsideration of how death, mourning, memories and history are currently being augmented in our technologically mediated society.
‘We hardly know what life is how can we hope to understand death?’ -Chinese sage Confucius (fifth century BC)

IF YOU ARE A:

Funeral Director
Thanatologist
Social Network Admin
Data Systems Admin
Product Manager
Information Systems Researcher
HCI Researcher
Digital Designer
Psychologist or Grief Counselor
Palliative Care Specialist
Historian
Pre-Need Sales Person
Funeral Celebrant
Estate Planner
Legacy Planner
End of Life Planner
Solicitors and Barristers in Intellectual Property and Estate Law
Clergy OR
Simply an Interested Human Being

THEN THIS IS THE CONFERENCE FOR YOU!
The format will be an open space un-conference with attendees creating the agenda and proposing sessions at the start. If you have a presentation, question, answer or particular interest you can propose a session at.

ABOUT THE TROPENMUSEUM
The Tropenmuseum presents, researches and encourages knowledge about and exchange between cultures. It offers a wide and varied audience an experience that utilises every form of museum presentation: exhibitions, collections and expertise, publications, the historic building, educational and other activities. The Royal Tropical Institute’s museum is active internationally in the field of culture and development.

DEATH MATTERS @ THE TROPENMUSEUM
Death Matters shows how people deal with death in different parts of the world. How they mourn and commemorate: whether privately or openly, soberly or exuberantly, alone or communally. Various forms of leave-taking, mourning and commemorating are presented in the exhibition. These reveal much about what people think about life, death and the hereafter. Besides objects, personal stories and films, Death Matters also features recent work by international artists such as Marina Abramovic, Yang Jiechang, Jan Fabre, Carlos Amorales and Krien Clevis referring to various cultural traditions connected with death.SOME

QUESTION WE HOPE WILL BE RAISED BY THE EVENT:

What does this change mean for loved ones of the departed?
What does it mean for professionals in end of life care and post mortem services?
How does it change the way online tools and social networks are constructed and the service providers ‘terms and conditions’?
What are the new forms of estate and legacy planning?
What does this mean for governments in terms of archiving, digital heritage and the collection of public records?
What businesses are serving this ‘new’ market and what do these businesses have to offer?

PUBLIC TRANSPORT
Accessible by tram 3, 7, 9, 10, 14 and bus 22

TROPENMUSEUM
Linnaeusstraat 2, 1092 CK Amsterdam

Materialization of Digital Death

DDD #2, Events, session notes, SF Bay Area Comments Off

May 092011

Materialization of Digital Death
Session Notes: John Romano

- social grief

- comparing online memorials to social networks

- transformation of social profiles into memorials

- people don’t care about their own profile but have strong feelings about other people’s profiles

- a memorialized profile still “belongs” to the deceased
– people talk TO the dead on profiles, not about the dead

- tasks of grieving
– requires talking to the dead
– also requires talking to the living

- pattern matching makes people mirror what others are doing
– creates shifting norms that people follow

- declaration of purpose of the place defines how people act

- is the social network the right place to grieve?
– what people really want their social network to do
– mixed social spheres often makes communal grieving difficult

- there are third party grieving sites that are more intentional places to grieve

- messages from the dead

- avatars

Digital Identity 101 a primer for Digital Death Day

DDD #2, Events, session notes, SF Bay Area Comments Off

May 092011

Digital Identity 101
Session Leader: Kaliya Hamlin
Notes Taker: Jed Bruaker

National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace
- Not a single ID
- Not a national ID

It is coming through the chamber of commerce, business focused

Comes via three initiatives:
- Obama addressing challenges in cyberspace
—- Phishing and Password reuse
- FICAM (Federal Identity and Credential Access Management, Under the Federal CIO Roundtable
—- Link to K’s FastCompany article, National! Identity! Cyberspace! Why we shoudln’t freak out about NSTIC.

One way to solve current identity issues is with a national ID.
- Not gonna work in the US. (Political, logistical reasons)
- Government cost of maintaining a user account is between $12-100/yr (this is currently experienced by each government entity that handles identity verification separately)

NSTIC is a vetted identity that is issued by a 3rd party, that can then be used at any number of service providers/user accounts
- Talking about another layer via two-factor authentication (e.g., single use passwords)

Identifiers
- Email uses a password
- Bank accounts use a card, and pin number
- Banks are mandated to do two-factor authentication. The second factor is invisible to end users — it is the “we don’t recognize this computer” screen.

NSTIC has asked for feedback
- We should probably write in and say “what about death?”

OAuth
- Let’s you connect two accounts without passwords, and lets information move between them
- Works by service A saying “do you want to link account on service B to us”? You then go to service B that says “are you sure”? They exchange tokens that effectively creates a tunnel that information can move through.
- I’ve predominantly seen this in terms of logins
- This can be thought of as a series of tunnels.
- Could conceptually be used as a notification service: E.g., a death related service could have links to a variety of providers that could be notified when using the death service

Trust Framework
- Set of policies that a group of agrees on
- Needed to enable scaling beyond federation (pairwise or hub and spoke structures to network structures).
- A set of policies that is used for identity vetting (e.g., ICANN, PBS Kids, etc.)
- If the criterion are met, you can “trust” the implementer

- Levels of Assurance (how well are they vetting)
- Levels of Protection (how well is it secured)
- Levels of Control (how much control do end users have)
— Potential for LOC relative to death?

- Auditors have then emerged to test a provider in relationship to these trust frameworks

Business Models options for Digital Death

DDD #2, session notes, SF Bay Area Comments Off

May 092011

These are notes from the 2nd North American Digital Death Day May 6th, 2011 in Mountain View California.

The session was about Business Models for services based on Digital Death.
- problem : solution : benefit : value
- current legal process
- a new legal process by choice and automated control
- different kinds of value
– emotional value
– familial value
– historical value
- business models
– while alive user pays
– legal
– access control
– driving traffic (advertising model)
– post death paid by relatives
– idea: kit that person can buy
– idea: discovery system like Entrustet

How can funeral directors help families in preparing for their digital death

DDD#1, Events, session notes, SF Bay Area Comments Off

Sep 042010

This was a session at Digital Death Day May 20th, 2010, Mountain View California.

Convened by Ryan Thogmartin from Connecting Directors

How can funeral directors help families in preparing for their digital death?
Digital death has not been discussed in the industry at all to date.

Funeral directors need to be better understand and be taught about digital death, at least a resource point for this information.

how can funeral directors be a facilitator for digital death information.
could companies like legacy locker be instrumental in working w/funeral directors, as a means for funeral directors
how do we pull together all of the players and all of the resources for funeral directors to be able to make recommendations.

- funeral homes s/b an integral part of “getting one’s affairs in order”

- one’s estate is larger than just digital assets… digital assets are only a part of this larger set of tasks.

- funeral directors need to be aware of all of these services and resources.

- estate planners and funeral directors could each be a center for resources.

- financial planners and CPAs are points of contact for estate planners because they have more points of contact.

- the person who initiates the client contact, should lead the resource sharing, but where people don’t have financial planners, CPAs or estate planners, the funeral director s/b the “quarterback” for these services.

- hospice industry might also be a place for some of this to take place, but today they’re not thinking about digital issues at all.

- hospices may not have a choice to deal w/these issues since over the next 10 yrs every one dying will have to deal w/digital death issues.

- the “digital” side of this is almost irrelevant because these issues extend well beyond digital assets, but all assets.

- 75% of people haven’t create a will or their power of attorney.

- 92% of peeps on Facebook know what a power of attorney is.

- 80% of peeps will die a lingering death (ie. Alzheimer’s).

- Estate Planners and funeral directors make a good team where estate planners can be educational arm for the family.

- pre-paid funeral market in Canada is $3B. 10-20% plans never pay.

- in the U.S., Medicaid allows pre-payment of funeral arrangements. Because of this, funeral directors can be a facilitators for these relationships right away.

- what *is* a digital asset? Many of the online services provide licenses for use, not necessarily ownership.

- in some cases online services (ie. email) will send next of kin the data (messages) but will not let the family have access to the email account per se.

- Grave Robbers book on Amazon, talks about ISP policies.

- unclaimed asset issues and honoring people’s death desires can be better addressed through the electronic services being discussed.

- how do we educate the various constituencies about these issues.

- DieSmart.com was started for the purpose of disseminating information about the different types of information.

- DigitalDeathDay can serve as a clearing house and collaboration around being an information disseminator to the different constituent associations.

- Tying in DDD to the end of IIW could be the model for further discussion by tying it in to the back end of other associations.

- Government involvement is important and we should consider how we help to shape the evolving ecosystem and policy thicket.

- PR around these issues could help get get attention to this issue.

- Any service that is capturing user information should have a death policy to dictate what happens to people’s information after they die.

- Is it a “joint asset”… does it have survivorship?

- Digital assets could be designated as “title assets”.

- A “title property” designation means that an asset can be stipulated as having title which can then state who can have access to them after death.

- The issues may require that we focus on the underlying policy/legal issues.

- Frequent Flier Miles needs to be in a will for most companies to effect a transfer.

- Digital Death is a subset of the greater death industry, but the area that needs to be addressed better.

Digital Death Day #1 Closing Circle

DDD#1, session notes Comments Off

Sep 032010

Evan Carroll
Orignally open source model Forever drifted to conv value of both temporal and personal What is value of you today may not be tomorrow and vice versa
Do we choose what to preserve and curate a legacy? (fewer is higher value)
But having too much data is a problem we coudl solve with technology. Did not come to an agreement
Lots of tangents and examples. Notes by Stacey

Ryan
Death care side
Tried to id what industries should be forefront in talking about digial death and assets.
Concluded can’t just pinpoint funeral industry or estate mgt, it is whoever is first point of contact.
Who owns digital assets? Joint husband and wife?
Some deep questions without imm answers that will provide stepping stones to future conversations
Some intangibie things like accounts will be very valuable

To conclude Digital Death Day on May 20th, 2010 we invited everyone to share some reflections.

Kathleen Lane: Importance of having some kind of decision policy to decide what is assets
Next step, try to get this or some other group to create policies in right direction

Gordon Clark: He was in several sessions. Glad people interested in Family search services. Recording activity as it happens: Session had lots of ideas, like loggin all unser input. LEarned abou new FB streams, JSON aggregators Other thing brought up is parental control soft could keep track of activities. PErsistent urls would aid keeping track

Other session: What a web hosting co should do? Have verbiage in tOS about inheritance etc. Could be new templates for Creative Commons.

Steve Schmull?: Sessions he attended came down to legal, need for new laws and precedent. Thinks this needs to be established as precondition. If policies developed could become law.

Cam Hunt: More clearly realized difference between capability and data we want to preserve. Also made him think about his personal curation and how to protect other peoples interests

Josh Hunt: How do we determine what law is. Discussion gets down to basic terms. Tried to boil down what needs to be done first off. What are we doing as a society for data? Until answered can’t develop law. So law lagging technology.

Pierre Wolff: Who can introduce the information to the families? Estate or financial or funeral planners? WRT law, interesting things came out: idea that depending on classification of asset, it may not be yours to dispose of. You may not have a right to do what you want! How complicated could this get? There is concept of “Future Descendant Authorization” : rights to descendants you don’t even know yet. Wow!

Nate Entrustet: most interesting sessions were brainstorming terms of service that would fit with what people want to do. E.g. direction to delete property or other

Guy in blue shirt and glasses:: Impressed how early stage this stuff is. Not sure if people will be interested in everything I’ve ever done. So many unanswered questions, good to get many perspectives, knowledge tools today.

Eli: Learned a lot! Was also in legal context session on TOS. Death beneficiary clause to avoid probate complications. Ran first own unconf session on managing multiple identities after death. May want to hide things, or keep them in certain family, busines, or other context.

Stacey P: Great to meet other people doing this kind fo work. Session she ran was really informative. Good to chat about sociological, anthropological, ethnographic viewpoints.

Nate: Property distinction is key. Ownership is 90% of stuff we deal with. professionals here each had their own viewpoint, lawyers, funeral directors, etc. Josh said laws are written generally because lobbyists bend ears. Here they will come from big service providers, may not have users interests in mind. Will not want to be constrained by legal protection, would prefer to continue to impose their own TOS. Looking forward to future collaboration.

Kaliya: Death legacy is another angle on data ownership – in identity community we work on ownership of own data by the living, but this may be valuable also in gaining protections. Cross-industry collaboration could be effective, let’s work on it. Move on to how to continue the conversation? Group here was small but an amazing cross section. What kind of outreach do we want to do? And what conversation do we want to continue from here online?

How do we keep the Digital Death Day (DDD) effort going? how does community take stewardship of this process? what does the next event look like?…or do we get other communities involved or pitch at their events?

How do we keep the discussion going online?

Google Group to continue the conversation.
Need to get more money into the group?
Follow-up event at the end of the next IIW.

Piggy-back on other associations’ events.

American Law Institute in Madison, WI (2nd week of June)
Eckerling in Miami, FL
UPPO (Unclaimed Property Practioner Organization)
Nat’l Unclaimed Property Administrators
National Funeral Directors Association
Int’l Cemetery & Cremation Funeral Association
Internet Identity Workshop

E.U.-UK/US Skype link in order to enable discussions between DDD groups in the EU and the US.
Consider creating a .ORG to carry the banner for the issues of the DDD
the Identity Commons service can enable groups to operate autonomously w/o having to create a DDD org. Kaliya can help facilitate that.
Is Digital Death Day the right name? –> Arrested Pixel –> Digital Afterlife
How closed or open should this group be? –> can we have a public space and a private space? –> require people who want to be involved in participating to make the effort to request participation. –> use Keith Teare’s “s.erious.ly” blog aggregation service to get blogs fm the various folks talking about this issue feeding into the site. –> resource site w/links the various related services
Create support for “piggy-back” events.
Kathy to lead effort for next estate planning group in CA. Cam to lead effort for next IIW event in Washington DC.
Blog aggregation editors: Eli Edwards & Evan Carroll.
Need a way for people to provide email address for signing up to e-newsletters and notifications from the organization.
Does an association w/Identity Commons dependence frame how others see what we are trying to do? –> one response was “it’s a positive association” –> another response was “we need to keep our design very independent”
Stacey will work on a design of our logo.
Pierre will begin reach out to some of the large social media companies to get to the right people who need to be involved in the conversation.
Kaliya will include every one on to an email list and send out request for opting out of having DDD participants email addresses shared with the group.
Kaliya and Nate will pursue discussion on moving forward w/initial piggy-back event.
Stacey will circulate a “mood board”.
Co-administrator to approve applications for email list: Cam & Stacey [Kaliya]

Understanding and Contrasting Password and Identity Management Services

DDD#1, Events, session notes, SF Bay Area, Uncategorized 1 Response »

May 262010

These are the notes from a session during Digital Death Day, May 20th in Mountain View California.

Understanding and Contrasting Password and Identity Management Services

Convened by Entrustet (Nathan Lustig) and Legacy Locker (Jeremy Toeman)

Legacy Locker
Philosophy of why Jeremy started it. Two issues: How do you keep data secure / users secure? How long will you be around?

Answers: How long will you be around? Business is inexpensive to run. Servers, technology. Cash flow positive. Cost to build and maintain are very low. Growth leads to increased cost, labor, staffing, infrastructure. Should be able to sustain operations fairly easily.

Security. No such thing as a completely secure website. Everything is hackable. Security is designed like a bank. Vault, inside the vault is a series of additional vaults; inside the series of vaults is another series of vaults. Triple secured. Hackers would have to hack multiple levels to access any individual account.

Biggest threat. Users with one email address for a number of different accounts. Access to one email account could lead to the breach of numerous additional account because of shared usernames and passwords.

Entrustet
Entrustet stores users names and passwords on a completely different server. Legacy Locker the same. Multiple layers of protection.

Security, Darren Jack, recited his experiences when working with a big four accounting firm. They called ahead saying they were from local telephone company and asked the employees to leave their computers on. When they came to the facility to visit they flipped over keyboards and discovered a plethora of the users passwords on the reverse side.

Jeremy provided a virtual exhibition of Legacy Locker.

Jeremy has taken the position that the market is families with children. Younger will makers. “Highly digital people” is not a real or ascertainable target market. It comes down to the user’s personal feeling of mortality: Mortal or Immortal. Birth and Death are opportune moments.

Legacy Locker is designed to be family friendly. Mint.com inspired. Topic not friendly but the experience / process can be. First visit taken through the list of things that might be important. Accounts/assets people may not think about. Traditional assets are not the main focus. Discuss security. Pictures/legacy. Financial and estate planners. Features: digital assets defined etc. Dashboard: create and manage stuff. Digital Assets. Each asset is represented visually and categorically. Examples include gmail, twitter, ebay, godaddy, paypal. Creating an asset consists of a drop-down menu for different digital assets, notes to others, videos, letters, files. Can also include notes to beneficiary. Radio box to appoint designated beneficiaries. Also feature to add beneficiaries. Can add email for beneficiaries to confirm existence. Optional: may not want to share with beneficiaries during life.

Terms of service do not properly address the issues. Legacy Locker has taken a hands off approach from a legal perspective due to the murky legal issues involved with accounts such as gmail. Serves as the digital form of piece of paper with directions regarding digital assets. Jeremey believes the service providers can partner with Legacy Locker and Entrustet to confirm death and provide access / ease of passage.

Legacy letters another feature. Send a confirmation email to designated bene. Accepted Role. Notification of death: took a life insurance verification approach. Lengthy process to verify death.

Entrustet virtual demonstration.

Launched at SXSW.

Account Guardian. Free. Account Incinerator. Destruction of online accounts / assets. Lawyers directory. Corporate partners. Broadjam. Widget to directs corporate partners’ users to Entrustet for distribution / destruction of online accounts.

Test account. Step by step wizard approach. Walk through the signup step by step. Email, social networking. The initial setup focuses on the three typical classes of digital assets.

Digital Executor. Trusted tech savvy person nominated to notify Entrustet and also work to distribute assets to heirs.

Account Guardian. Click on logos of different accounts to add login/password. U and P not required but advised.

Protect files on your computer. Mozy, automated backup protection. Ideally put Mozy account into Entrustet account. Add your heirs feature. Legally protecting your digital assets: 1. Print out in safe deposit box or manila envelope. 2. Legal zoom. 3. Taken it to an attorney to incorporate by reference into the will.

Revenue sources include the lawyers directory, Account Incinerator, Affiliate partnerships, and corporate partners. Hoping to provide clearer guidance from the company’s perspective on how to deal with user accounts. Browser plug-in / add-on: Password keychain feature to update Entrustet in real-time.

Slightly different approaches to verify death. Require a death certificate and call to local vital records office to verify death for Entrustet. Legacy Locker has appointed verifiers. Need to add one but request two.

Probate is a public process. Some people don’t want that. Trust planning and property classification and definitions.

Dazza: Market standards. Universal terms of service.

Liability and costs. Sentimental versus monetary asset categories.

Thank You for a great 1st Digital Death Day

DDD#1, Events, SF Bay Area, Uncategorized 3 Responses »

May 262010

The first digital death day was a great success. We had 30 people from all over the US, Canada and one person from the UK. Leaders in different fields all related to digital death had in-depth self-organized conversations.

A main theme that emerged was around the issues surrounding digital assets and property rights. Until this question is figured out, we don’t have much ability to answer many of the questions that were raised. We have begun a group digitaldeath.org & a mailing list open to any one interested in the topic if they express interest in joining.

Sessions convened were as follows. As notes come in, we will link to them.

SESSION 1

Understanding and Contrasting Password and Identity Management Services
Digital Death: Communal Bereavement and Networked Support, Film & Conversation
Protect-Sharing Rich Family History

SESSION 2

What would an open-source public private partnership mode of digital legacy preservation look like?
Thinking about Forever
Economics of Domain Names and Online Memorials
Legal Context, Terms of Service and Best Practices for Social Sites and Services
How do we reach out to social network/media services then part of conversation

SESSION 3

“Safe” Media Hosting Requirements. Privacy/Terms of Service, Preservation, Sharable, Collaboration, Beneficiary

SESSION 4

Identifying Digital Assets, Listings, FrmD?
How Can Funeral Directors Help/Join Families in Preparing Their Digital Death.
One Physical Death, Many Digital Deaths: How to manage multiple personas Post-Death

SESSION 5

How do people who do not have digital content create and preserve “something” online?
Digital Estate Planning, Wills, Trusts, Binding property dispositions // Can I will my Virtual Farm? Virtual Items/Currency and REal World Value: Who controls after owners Death? // Digital Identity/Legacy: Privacy vs. Access & Collaboration

NEXT DIGITAL DEATH DAY!

We will be hosting another Digital Death Day November 12th after the next Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View. Other events are also being considered for DC (1st week of September) and London (2nd week of October).

Hotel and Airports

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Apr 252010

This event is being held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

The closest airport is San Jose International, next closest is San Francisco International and third closest is Oakland International.

There are many hotels near the event, and particularly along El Camino Real. The organizers will be staying at the Avante Hotel. Some hotels offer free shuttles to tech campuses (and the Museum) in the area. Others don’t and you would need to rent a car. The Quality Inn and Suites appears to be walking distance from the museum.

Let us know if there is other information you want to know about. We are happy to help.

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Digital Death Day

kaliya

Digital Death Day Europe 2011 - Success

Digital Death Day Europe 2011

Digital Death Day 2011 Europe will be November 11, 2011.

9am to 4:30 at the TropenMuseum

Registration IS Open.

Materialization of Digital Death

Digital Identity 101 a primer for Digital Death Day

Business Models options for Digital Death

How can funeral directors help families in preparing for their digital death

Digital Death Day #1 Closing Circle

Understanding and Contrasting Password and Identity Management Services

Thank You for a great 1st Digital Death Day

Hotel and Airports

Sponsors

Community Sponsor

Tweet Blender

Links