Corporate Actors

3. Who Speaks for ZCorp, Script by Bob Blakley

Act Three, Notes from WAAA2007

 

Use Case

We want to provide identities for corporations in social networks, with these identities reflecting the special hierarchical nature of the corporation.

 

As one aspect of managing corporate identities, we want to make the roles taken by individual identities clear, whether a person is speaking for themselves, as an official spokesperson for an organization, or in some other official or unofficial role such as internal organizational expert, independent expert, or even in an anonymous role.

 

Organizational identities are hierarchical by nature, where there are actually one or more individual identities that officially speak for that organization, and there may be other individual identities that want to be validated as belonging to the organization but do not speak for it as an official representative.

 

Individuals, in a similar manner, may want to speak under different roles or as members of more than one organization, so one physical person may have several related but linked identities, including an anonymous one.

 

To aid in the validation use case, and to give users a sense of both trust of other identities and a sense of value of their own identity, these identities must be persistent and must have a “karmic link”. This karma ties a constellation of identities together and provides accountability for the commentary generated by that identity. Even anonymous comments can be given weight by the reputation associated with the core identity behind it, even if that identity remains hidden. Likewise, feedback on anonymous comments will affect the internal reputation of that core identity.

 

Capabilities

(what actions the user of the system will perform)

 

• Create individual accounts, which may be tied together with a “root” account and aliases (or perhaps, “roles”).
• Create a group account, which will be an umbrella over one or more individual accounts, and assign roles and authority to officially associated accounts.
• Validate accounts
• View the karma and role information on your personal account as well as on other accounts.
• Link accounts in various ways (e.g. friend, fan-of, watcher, alias) to both internal accounts and external accounts (e.g. passport, facebook).
• “Watch” communication from selected sub-accounts (e.g. a group account can monitor what is said by its officially designated sub-accounts).

 

Applications

(the programmatic elements needed to fulfill the capabilities)

 

• Hierarchy of identities in our Database
• UI to manage IDs and control visibility of information
• Integrate IDs to login and commentary to all other applications
• Integrate a rating system to all commentary that links back to ID karma
• “watch” capability on account activity (similar to the “e-mail me when this page changes” feature, but more of an “e-mail me when this sub-account posts”).