Spherical Cow Consulting

Translating geek to human

Standards Transparency: Public Isn’t the Same as Understandable

Heather examines why making standards information public is not enough to make the work understandable. This episode explores the growing challenge of navigating specifications, document status, provenance, working group activity, and related standards across digital identity, AI, security, privacy, and other overlapping technical domains.

Learn how structured standards data, APIs, and AI tools can make research more efficient without replacing human judgment. Heather explains why better transparency means making process context accessible, so implementers, architects, policymakers, researchers, and analysts can make informed decisions without years of institutional knowledge.

Keeping Up With Standards Without Pretending You Can Keep Up

Heather explores why keeping up with standards development does not mean tracking everything. This episode looks at how a lightweight standards radar can surface emerging work across digital identity, AI, authorization, credentials, and related technologies, while recognizing that new ideas appear far faster than any individual can follow.

Discover how automation, structured public data, and human judgment can work together to identify what deserves closer attention. Heather explains why Internet-Drafts provide signals rather than certainty, how context reveals momentum, and why useful awareness—not perfect completeness—is the more realistic goal.

Staying Useful in a Geopolitical Internet: Reflections from IETF 126

Learn why nation state politics are increasingly shaping technical standards and the future of the Internet. Drawing on reflections from IETF 126, Heather examines how regulatory pressure, geopolitical interests, and competing views of privacy, security, openness, and interoperability can influence standards development and individual contributors.

Explore how to participate thoughtfully when larger forces enter the standards process. Heather considers practical ways to evaluate proposals beyond who submits them, recognize patterns, question architectural assumptions, and protect global interoperability while acknowledging legitimate policy concerns and the real harms the Internet can create.

Technical Standards Were Never Outside Politics

Heather explores why technical standards have never been truly separate from politics, even when they remain nonpartisan. This episode examines how choices around interoperability, privacy, security, and user needs embed values into Internet standards, influencing trust, authority, and the relationships between people, institutions, and technology.

Learn how standards bodies navigate issues such as end-to-end encryption, age assurance, surveillance, and global interoperability without becoming legislatures. Heather explains why making architectural values explicit strengthens technical credibility and helps standards communities respond to the growing pressures of regulation, governance, and digital policy.

Take the Selfie

Heather examines why a simple conference selfie can become one of the most meaningful records of your professional life. Rather than posting for social media, she explores how preserving moments with colleagues, collaborators, and mentors helps capture the relationships that shape careers and strengthen professional communities.

Discover how thoughtful conference etiquette, privacy, and consent fit alongside authentic networking and lasting connections. This episode reflects on memory, digital identity, and the people behind the work, offering a reminder that some of the most valuable professional moments are worth preserving, even if they never become public.

How to Research a Defensible Paper Without Drowning in Sources

In this episode, Heather explores a practical framework for researching complex technology topics and building recommendations that stand up to scrutiny. From defining the right research question to evaluating academic literature, institutional reports, and real-world implementation, she explains how disciplined research creates stronger strategic decisions.

Learn how source verification, outreach, structured evidence tracking, and thoughtful use of AI can strengthen research without replacing human judgment. Whether you're writing policy papers, standards proposals, or strategic recommendations, these methods help produce credible, transparent, and defensible work grounded in evidence rather than assumption.

The Identity Salon: Five-Year Problems, Chatham House Notes, and DNS Nonsense

Discover how the Identity Salon creates a high trust, vendor neutral space for senior identity practitioners to explore the five to seven year challenges shaping digital identity. Heather shares why forward looking conversations matter and how candid discussion can surface architectural assumptions before they become operational problems.

Explore how identity proofing, digital wallets, AI agents, governance, delegation, and security architecture increasingly intersect. This episode offers a behind the scenes look at building the Identity Salon, producing Chatham House Rule reports, and creating sustainable conversations that help enterprise identity leaders prepare for what comes next.

Governance Means Something. Just Not Always the Same Thing.

Learn why the word governance can mean very different things across digital identity, Identity Governance and Administration (IGA), and AI governance. This episode explores how those differences affect enterprise identity systems, access management, and the growing role of artificial intelligence in identity-related decision-making.

Discover how AI-powered identity governance introduces new questions about accountability, transparency, delegated authority, and auditability. Heather explains why organizations need both strong IGA controls and AI governance frameworks to ensure access decisions remain secure, explainable, and aligned with organizational policy as automation continues to expand.

When Process Stops Protecting the Work

Heather explores the fine line between healthy dissent and procedural obstruction in standards development, examining how appeals, objections, and governance processes can strengthen collaboration—or slowly undermine it. This episode considers why protecting fairness also requires protecting the people doing the technical work.

Learn how process abuse affects standards organizations, contributor participation, and technical decision-making. Heather discusses practical ways to document recurring patterns, support chairs and editors, and preserve constructive disagreement without allowing procedural conflict to overwhelm progress or discourage future contributors.

Choosing a Discovery Mechanism Is the Hard Part

Heather examines why choosing the right discovery mechanism is one of the most challenging aspects of digital identity architecture. This episode explores how DNS, well-known URIs, registries, and catalogs each solve different discovery problems, and why understanding trust, authority, and governance must come before selecting infrastructure.

Discover how discovery mechanisms shape privacy, delegation, authorization, and system behavior. Heather explains why successful digital identity design depends on asking the right architectural questions first, ensuring discovery supports the correct level of trust, governance, and secure action across modern distributed systems.