The Architecture of online social systems - Identity

As an architect, I am constantly on the look out for general principles and frameworks, which can become guides for my work. I am often restless till I have discovered such underlying themes which I can work with. The process of refining these frameworks is rather long, since I have to test them several times before I am convinced of their general applicability and merit.  

Ever since I worked on a large project with an education agency last year, to build an integrated knowledge and collaboration system, I have been thinking about the architecture of online social systems. Elsewhere on my blogs, I have written about how I see online social systems as concerned with 'moving sociality online". It is that idea that has guided me in the process of discovering and developing this framework.  

I will outline this framework and develop it further in separate posts over the next several weeks. It would be wonderful to think of this as a living document, so that I could refine these ideas over time with our conversation, so that we could make this robust.
In this post I will discuss the first and perhaps most crucial element - 'Identity'.  

Identity:
In order to operate in this online social world, one of the most important elements is the need for a participant/citizen to have an identity. At its most basic level it involves, defining a persona for this virtual world - a name, contact information and so on.  

In the real world people get to know us in several ways. We perform multiple roles in our professional and private lives. Within these domains, there are several facets to our personalities. People who are involved with us in any of these professional and personal relationships, are exposed to these facets, through the various encounters that they have. We also provide them with several other clues to who we are - some explicit and others perhaps not so. There are aspects of our character which are revealed over time, and perhaps they become parts of stories people tell of us and of the things we do. While the depth to which people get to know us varies, however, there is a certain amount of knowledge they must have for them to engage with us, depending on the nature of the interaction.  

We need to think about creating such personas in the online world as well. These personas need to provide enough information so that the people we wish to transact with and relate to can obtain a rich and nuanced picture of who we are and whether they can expect a meaningful interaction. If they have come to us through indirect paths, they might want to know about our credibility and they need to be able to obtain such information too. In fact we need to go beyond what we do in the real world, in terms of providing information about ourselves, since in the online world, what people can see about us is only a partial representation. After all, my picture would not tell you about my predilection for drawing on whiteboards.

 
Now, this online identity only needs to be adequate to serve your purpose in a given environment. In a games environment or in Second Life, this persona might have no relation to your real life self at all, or rather little. However, in the case of a professional environment, building credibility and trust are contingent on providing accurate and pertinent information. Till people develop trust in you, they might look for other indicators.  

My real life persona is complex and multi-faceted, (which is indeed true for all of us). What you know of me depends on the context in which we have met and related. I expect the same to be the case in the online world. More than what we say about ourselves, what we do, in the forms of our various interactions in this virtual environment and what others have to say about us, all contribute to the believability and richness of one's incarnation in this other world - one's avatar!
We can thus identify the elements we need to provide for in the construction of online identities - from basic personal information, usually obtained from formal organizational systems, to richer and nuanced descriptions we ourselves provide , to indirectly derived profiles enriched with information mined from various sources which show our relationships to the rest of the online and real world, our networks, our credibility and our value to the community.

 
In my next post, I will write about the need for dealing with people and objects in the virtual world - content of various kinds, artifacts, and even people-based objects, and what we need to do to create a place and identity for them in this online world.