There is a lot we can learn from github and its identity model about the role of individual identity in the future of firms, networks and markets. When Linus Torvalds released git in 2005 he made a crucial innovation in version control widely available: git makes the full development history available locally to every developer (or put differently it is a distributed system). Over time this has made git the most widely adopted system of its kind.
That in turn opened up the opportunity for github to provide a missing ingredient in the form of identity. If you and I want to collaborate via git there are different ways to do this but none that are provided by git itself let me say something like “make this repository accessible to fredwilson” – and in turn “fredwilson” can’t easily see all the repositories he has access to and with whom he is collaborating on those.
Now github not only provided individuals with an identity to use with git but they also had a second clever innovation that points to the future: I can form an organization on github and then invite existing individuals to that organization. As an individual I can see the different organizations I belong to. This is fundamentally different from how organizations work in most systems where I have an account that I log in on behalf of that organization and that is issued to me by that organization.
It is hard to overstate how profound that model is. Imagine for a second if I had a single Salesforce account and could belong to multiple organizations (possibly simultaneously but maybe just sequentially over time) with that account. This new setup makes it possible to take something with me. Github doesn’t exploit this yet (as far as I know), but for instance, it could allow me to keep some statistics, such as how many commits did I make to code of an organization. Or in the case of Salesforce, how much did I generate in leads or revenues.
In other words, the github identity-organization model shows a path to a future in which I as an individual own much more of my work history and performance directly. But there is one major issue with this model nonetheless. Now github controls my identity. So what’s the solution to that?
Well it is the Blockchain ID provided by as part of the Blockstack set of protocols. It will allow me as an individual to control my own identity and services to make use of that identity. With Blockchain ID, I can control my own identity, am not locked into a particular registrar and can use that identity to sign into different services. While adoption will take some time, I would then be able to share my repository with “+fredwilson” and not need to know if Fred is using github or gitlab or something else altogether. In turn Fred could move around and still belong to different organizations while having his reputation portable.
