I was really looking forward to Alex’s panel, and I’ll have to admit that I was pretty disappointed by how it turned out. It never seemed to get any momentum, was all over the place, and rarely touched upon any of what was implied by the abstract. Kathryn was rockin the SubEthaEdit on this one and has a comprehensive transcript on the notes exchange so you can judge for yourself. Also Ka-Ping Yee (hey, he’s put up a new Usable Security Blog up after SXSW), who I hadn’t met before came off very well (and IMO had the most interesting things to say).

For what it’s worth, here’s a quickie run-down of some things I might have liked discussed:

• Defining trusts at the node, system, and meta-system level (not covering this first was probably what threw the whole panel off)
• Control of personal data propagation through the network, specifically in addressing issues of social context friction/collisions (and their real world implications!)
• Relationship management, particularly interchange, how they map
• Good and bad ways to represent complex relationships – directionality, transitivity, type, explicit/implicitness
• Actual different approaches for trust, application of the sociological/ontological into real-world systems

I’ve actually done a lot of thinking some of these issues (I’ve posted bits in the past), but it might be worth writing in depth sometime in the near future. In the past I’ve been of the opinion that the last thing the web needs is more punditry, but well, maybe not in this case.

Lastly, one thing I mentioned in the IRC channel at the end (did that get logged anywhere?) was that Danah Boyd gave a very interesting talk at ETECH 2004 on trust from a social theory perspective that I found to be quite interesting and an excellent way to get into the right frame of mind on these things.