Productivity and saving time have become powerful memes on the web. There are sites like 43 Folders and Lifehacker, there are applications like iGTD and Omnifocus. However, if you really want to save yourself a lot of time and become far more productive, just go to the Internet Identity Workshop on November 10-12 in Mountain View. You’ll learn more in three days, meet and exchange ideas with more of the web’s thoughtleaders and get more done than at a year’s worth of normal conferences. This is the place where the people who speak at other conferences come to learn and if you aren’t there, you’re behind the curve.

IIW follows the unconference process. Instead of preset talks and speakers, anyone can nominate a topic and groups form and coalesce around the topics that really matter to them. If you aren’t learning or contributing you are free to leave a group and move to another.

The conference is focused on “user-centric identity” - considering how end-users, regular people, can manage their own identity across the range of websites, services, companies and organizations that they belong to, purchase from and participate with.

The community will be exploring these kinds of questions:

• How are social networking sites and social media tools applying user-centric identity?
• What are the open standards to make it work? (identity and semantic)
• What are technical implementations of those standards?
• How do different standards and technical implementations interoperate?
• What are the new social norms and legal constructs needed to make it work?
• What tools are needed to make it usably secure for end-users?
• What are the businesses cases / models that drive all this?

Cost
The event is VERY affordable for a 2.5 day high quality conference with the leading professionals in the industry.

• Students - $50
• Independents (small startups, nonprofits)- $200
• Corporate - $350

If you have any interest in this area, the IIW is where you need to be this November.

http://www.windley.com/events/iiw2008b/announcement.shtml