Surviving Interfederation

I gave a presentation to FAM10 back in October in Cardiff, in the “Not for the faint hearted” session. You can download the slides as a PDF file from the illustration on the right.

My working title was “How to Survive the Coming Zombie Apocalypse”, but the presentation was really about how to survive the transition from cozy local federations to federated operation in the global internet. Whether that looks like a scary prospect depends, of course, on how conservative you’ve been to date: UK federation recommendations have always emphasised the difference between technical trust and behavioural trust, and the talk goes into some detail on this topic.

Understanding trust allows you to protect yourself against the zombie hordes (sorry, I mean “entities not bound by your local federation’s behavioural norms”). The other topic covered in detail is how to benefit from interfederation by making sure that you’re running software capable of interoperating widely.