Identity management is always a relationship. What should be questioned is one-sidedness as civilly experienced, i.e. a state’s formal domination of the relationship with correspondingly biased rules for identification.

in: Semiotics of identity management

 

[M]ethodological individualism implies that, when two individuals interact, they may have different needs for, respectively, attitudes toward identification.

in: Semiotics of identity management

 

Rather than opposing multiple identifications, a state should invest in their management for its democratically allocated tasks.

in: Semiotics of identity management

 

The increase in electronically mediated identification must, however, be compensated for and complemented with additional real-life verification.

in: Semiotics of identity management

 

The freedom allowed a citizen to entertain different identifications will, in most cases, even promote the general use of the state-guaranteed identification. After all, a single ‘key’ is convenient.

in: Semiotics of identity management

 

The more radical decomposition in both directions is, and including finely grained management of temporal variety, the more an actual model moves toward a lattice consisting mainly of identities. That is, they serve to connect.

in: Semiotics of identity management

 

When increasing the scale for integrated order I have come to especially appreciate the idea of conditioned actorship. For example, assume that a separate insurance plan exists for employees. First of all, the condition for being an employee is being a person, with being an employee subsequently a condition for being accepted as an insuree. I know insuree is not an English word, but that happens when trying to fit concepts at larger scales. I wouldn’t dare to set a limit to the levels of conditioning for actorship. As a recursive construct, it always works. It turns out rather addictive, as I must warn you (now already being too late :-). You’ll recognize conditioned actorships all over. What makes a person eligible to vote? What makes a person eligible to be on a sports team? What makes a person eligible to occupy a job? There was no need to specify such conditions with applications each oriented at some particular, say, final actorship, for example employee, customer, et cetera. All conditions are then ‘conveniently’ left implicit in constituting each application. For integrated order, however, there is no way around making them explicit. First of all, a qualitatively different approach to modeling is required.

in: note 71.7

 

Of structural relevance, and therefore deserving priority for modeling, seems to me to be a variety of even conditionally recursive relationships between, calling them by a general term, actors.

in: note 71.24

 

Indeed, for medical care such varying sets of differential relationships seem often quite elaborate, but I would say its (meta)structure is not categorically different from how behaviors are coordinated throughout society. Considering such relationships I don’t see any basic difference with, for example, how legal process is organized. For me it follows that the idea is to first of all concentrate on designing an as generally applicable model as currently imaginable of — the intricacies of — social interaction. It may sound like a counterintuitive move, but when it succeeds many traditionally evolved problems with specifically targeted information systems simply dissolve.

in: note 71.24

 

An event is — understood as being — shaped by behaviors of assorted ’whatevers.’ On account of attributed behaviors, they may be called actors. Through involvement with a particular event, an actor is a persona, i.e. the “player” of a matching role.

in: note 71.30

 

Actors are often constituted through sets of complementary instances, with all of them relevant for a more integrated order. […] Being eligible for one kind of actor, carrying the potential for actually-acting-as-a-persona, is often dependent on already being another kind of actor, and so on. If you want to practice as a medical doctor, you first of all need to be certified as one. Earlier, when you want to enter medical school, you must have passed high school successfully.
And, say, actorial — is that English? — differentiation in our society mostly follows ‘taking part in some capacity,’ usually functional, in another actor. Take person x and organization y. Thus, there are the actors x and y. When they enter into a job contract, two more actors are ‘derived:’ x-as-employee-of-y and y-as-employer-of-x. I can only emphasize that managing an integrated order required such explicit differentiation. It may not be simply assumed that y-as-employer-of-x covers x-as-employee-of-y. […]
Of course, it depends on the actual scope of facilitating interactions how many of such actorial constitutional cycles, with documentary ‘evidence’ for each set of resulting actors, should be made explicit (and available to authorized users). My contribution is to make sure that structurally it doesn’t matter. ‘Whatever’ is required, must always fit. Any change in scope, and thereby relevant instances and so on, should be accommodated with the same structure for variables.

in: note 71.30

 

Traditionally, an information system is paid for et cetera by some organization. Conceptually it then habitually disappears from view. The particular organization, or even part/function of it, is implicitly taken as the core of relevant meanings. For example, from the perspective of hrm a person is an employee. For an integrated order, however, it also needs to be made explicit that from the perspective of that person some organization is her/his employer.

in: note 71.30

 

What I simply take from such complexity, is that even when there should be some closed-off domain we could be limiting ourselves to with a conceptual model, which in fact there isn’t, the set of relevant roles is very large. How can we be sure of having drawn up an exhaustive list of relevant roles? And then, roles may change over time. When roles must practically be seen as elements of an open-ended set, there’s of course all the more reason to treat as open-ended how “players” interact according to their roles for some event.
So, […] some specific role should not be modeled as a separate type. For it would lead to an unmanageable multitude of types while being uncertain whether or not all relevant roles are covered by such types. And then there would be the nightmare of — trying to — establish pertinent relationships between them.
There’s really no solution in approaching such variety half-heartedly, that is, assuming two classes of roles with its ‘own’ type (also read: concept) for each, say, primary role and all so-called secondary roles brought under a collective role-type.
Only radical generalization helps. A specific role is not modeled as a correspondingly specific type, but a general type is modeled allowing a specific role to be described by some value of it. The model comes out deceptively simple. However, it affords an open-ended (dis)play of interrelated values.
Please note the shift. From a compact model, so-called software quantitatively amounts to ‘not much,’ too. How digital processing actually proceeds, becomes to a much larger extent determined by values (as such, also read: parameters).
Management of parameters is critical (which should also be seen as ‘programming’). With a sufficiently generalized concept of actor, at least in that respect boundaries between domains dissolve. […]
What drives widening scope are what I have called constitutional relationships. It makes the — structure of the — model recursive both syn- and diachronically (concurrently and for temporal sequences). Recursion is the miracle cure for structural minimalism.
A critically important point is to not only include values for the variety of the ‘other’ in interaction. Instead of keeping “our firm” implicit, the ‘self’ must be equally differentiated for balanced support — at the scale — of an integrated order. Especially the latter removes the prime obstacle for optimal integration of services, as you no longer try to reconcile (also read: standardize) values that ‘really’ need to remain different (and you may come up with other beneficial roles for the firm, then more easily adopted, too).
Of course, a compact model doesn’t make relevant details go away. It should make them far more manageable. What certainly appears “daunting in its complexity” may upon closer inspection to a large degree consist of a collection of all sorts of specifications. If so, for each ‘item’ the question is what it is supposed to specify. Following the maxim of ‘a place for everything, and everything in its place,’ the answer then lies in supplying the aimed-at ‘what’ in the overall model (which from such a necessarily generalized model will most likely be some value for some concept/type).

in: note 71.31