Spherical Cow Consulting

Translating geek to human

When Browsers Start Acting for You: AI Browsers and the Definition of a Web User Agent

Heather Flanagan explores how AI browsers are reshaping the definition of a web user agent, challenging long-standing web architecture principles around user control, consent, and interaction. As AI-driven features evolve from assistance to autonomous action, the browser’s traditional intermediary role begins to shift in subtle but important ways.

She examines key questions around delegation, accountability, and intent, including how browsers acting on behalf of users blur the line between human interaction and automation. This discussion highlights why emerging AI capabilities in web browsers demand early attention from digital identity, security, and standards communities.

Making Sense of ISO, IEC, and the Standards Maze

Heather Flanagan explores the complex world of ISO and IEC standards and why these global organizations play a critical role in digital identity infrastructure. From national body participation models to the scale of international standardization, this episode examines how these institutions shape technology far beyond traditional open standards communities.

Discover how structures like ISO/IEC JTC1, the PAS transposition process, and national standards bodies influence digital wallets, mobile credentials, and regulated identity systems. Heather explains why identity architects must understand both open standards and ISO/IEC governance as digital identity increasingly intersects with government policy and global interoperability.

How NOT to Get Your Conference Submission Binned

Heather Flanagan explores why conference submissions succeed and why many proposals get rejected during call for proposals review. As a content chair, she shares what reviewers look for in an abstract, including clear outcomes, audience fit, and authentic voice over generic buzzwords.

Get actionable guidance on using generative AI to polish—not replace—your ideas, plus tips for sharper titles and stronger structure. She also explains how to avoid vendor pitches, spell out acronyms, match format to scope, and use the space provided so your conference proposal stands out.

Designing Digital Wallets for Reality: Where Selective Disclosure and ZKPs Fit

Heather Flanagan explores how digital identity wallets are shifting from experimental concepts into real infrastructure, as selective disclosure and zero knowledge proofs move from theory into production. Drawing on recent policy, payments, and wallet deployments, she frames the architectural decisions now facing teams building privacy-preserving identity systems.

The episode examines where system complexity lives, how correlation risk emerges at scale, and why operational realities matter more than minimal pilots. It highlights trade-offs between credential models, cryptographic approaches, and long-term sustainability for regulators, enterprises, and ecosystem designers.

What Makes a Successful Standard?

In this episode, Heather Flanagan examines what truly defines a successful standard in digital identity. While adoption is often treated as the primary measure of success, she explores why that metric alone fails to capture the complexity of standards development and ecosystem coordination.

She unpacks the tension between implementation-first cultures and inclusive governance, highlighting how participation, interoperability, and competing implementations shape long-term outcomes. Ultimately, this discussion reframes success as a resilient process that enables credible disagreement and sustainable alignment across diverse stakeholders.

Understanding the FIDO Alliance’s Standards and Working Groups

Heather Flanagan explores why the FIDO Alliance can feel difficult to follow from the outside, and why that silence is often misunderstood. This episode examines how FIDO’s approach to standards development differs from more open processes, and what that means for people working in digital identity, authentication, and passkeys.

The discussion unpacks the meaning of open standards, member-driven governance, and the trade-offs between transparency and collaboration. By understanding FIDO working groups, special interest groups, and closed development models, practitioners can better interpret published specifications and anticipate how authentication standards evolve.

Contributor Skills: How Standards Are Created

Heather Flanagan explores what it really takes to be an effective contributor in standards development and digital identity work. Moving beyond visible roles like working group chairs, the discussion centers on how specifications are actually shaped through collaboration, technical debate, and sustained participation.

Discover how contributors add value as subject matter experts, implementers, and reviewers, and why skills like preparation, constructive disagreement, and process awareness matter. This episode explains how consensus works, why reliability outweighs brilliance, and how thoughtful contributions directly influence interoperable, implementable digital identity standards.

Internet Shutdowns and the Reality of a Fragmented Internet

Heather Flanagan examines internet fragmentation through the lens of modern internet shutdowns. Using recent, well-documented cases, she explains how connectivity is selectively constrained and why shutdowns are no longer rare emergencies but predictable outcomes of network architecture and governance.

Discover how these shutdowns directly impact digital identity systems, from federation failures to lost auditability. Learn why treating the network as neutral and always available is increasingly risky, and why architects, policymakers, and identity teams must rethink assumptions about global interoperability and resilience.

Inside the OpenID DCP Working Group: Issuance, Presentation, and Reality

Discover how the OpenID Foundation’s Digital Credentials Protocols Working Group is shaping real-world digital credential issuance and presentation. Learn why standards decisions around interoperability, credential formats, and web-based flows matter for implementers, regulators, and identity architects navigating a complex digital identity ecosystem.

Discover how pseudonymous authentication, assurance profiles like HAPE, and conformance testing influence deployments and regulatory alignment. Learn why following the work of the OpenID DCP Working Group offers insight into where digital identity standards are stabilizing, stalling, and reshaping systems.

The AI System That Never Was

Learn why the idea of an “AI system” is quietly breaking down under modern AI governance and deployment realities. Heather Flanagan examines how agentic workflows, standards debates, and policy frameworks are exposing gaps between governance language and real-world AI architectures.

Discover how this disconnect affects digital identity, accountability, and interoperability, and why unclear definitions create governance risk. Learn why engineers, standards bodies, and policymakers are struggling to align, and why fixing AI language is essential to building enforceable, trustworthy identity and governance frameworks.