Workshop report for DISIPRAC: Digital identity security information practices of citizens

I am pleased to share with you the final report from the DISIPRAC workshop held in Edinburgh on 27 February 2020. The workshop was held at Edinburgh Napier University as part of a research project called “DISIPRAC: Workshop report for DISIPRAC: Digital identity security information practices of citizens”. This work was undertaken by myself and my Centre for Social Informatics colleague, Peter Cruickshank.

In the report, we provide a summary of the workshop and provide some evidence of several issues around the management of digital identities based on a series of scenarios. We are not making recommendations in the report, although we do hope that the content might inspire others to start thinking about solutions to some of the issues that were raised at the workshop. The report covers:

  • The service user, including issues and risks associated with helping them
  • The role of the helper or “proxy”, including associated challenges and points of conflict, and the role of guidelines and training
  • An overview of the terminology, including identity, issues with the word “proxy”, and the role that trust plays
  • Some implications for systems design

The next steps that Peter and I will take on this project include academic dissemination in the form of conference papers and posters and the creation of a roadmap for future, related research. We want to use the findings from this to support a larger-scale project on information proxies and real-world online identity management.

We are keen to continue engaging with practitioners and community volunteers, so we would appreciate it if you could help by sharing with us your thoughts and feedback related to the contents of the report and (importantly) the next steps or related future work that you think we should consider.

Download the workshop report:

The full report (.pdf file) can be accessed from the Edinburgh Napier University Repository here or download the file here.

Also available is a template (.docx file) for the scenario worksheets. This can be accessed from the Repository here or you can download the file here.

These documents are provided with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. Please share changes and examples with the original authors, Peter Cruickshank (p.cruickshank@napier.ac.uk) and Frances Ryan (frances@francesryanphd.com).

Please do not hesitate to get in touch with Peter or me if you have any questions or feedback.

Join the conversation!