“Every so often, I accidentally start a side project. Sometimes this is because I have had a brilliant idea.”

Sometimes it is because I have had a stubborn idea. More often, it is because a few people I trust keep circling the same gap in the industry, and eventually one of us says, usually over an excellent Scotch whisky, “Fine. Apparently we have to build the thing.”

The original conversation was with Ian Glazer, Andi Hindle, and me. We were talking about a gap in the identity industry, particularly for senior enterprise architects and the people who have to think several moves ahead.

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The Gap We Kept Seeing

Identiverse is a fabulous conference. I say that with some bias, yes, but also with a great deal of respect for what that event does well. It is very good at the problems people are facing now: what is breaking now, what needs to be funded now, what regulators are asking now, what programs are trying to ship now, what teams are trying to explain to leadership before everyone’s eyes glaze over.

But another category of conversation tends to happen in hallways, over coffee, or in the bar after the official programming ends. Those are the conversations about the problems senior architects can see coming in the next five to seven years.

That timeframe is actually an important part of this story. Five to seven years is not science fiction. It is not “someday.” It is also not next quarter’s implementation crisis. For senior enterprise architects, five to seven years is a completely reasonable planning horizon. In many cases, thinking about that horizon is quite literally in the job description.

There are also wonderful events like the Internet Identity Workshop. IIW is one of the most important spaces in the identity ecosystem, and I will happily continue to send people there. But IIW is often highly speculative by design. It is an unconference. It is where potential standards work, new ideas, rough edges, and ambitious concepts can be tested in public with people who know how to argue productively.

That is necessary, but, alas, it is not always what an enterprise architect needs when they are trying to figure out how wallet ecosystems, AI-mediated access, delegation, fraud detection, identity proofing, regulatory requirements, workforce identity, and security architecture are all going to collide before their current roadmap is done pretending to be realistic.

So we started The Identity Salon™.

Why This Fits Me Better Than I Expected

I do not think of myself as a visionary thinker. There is nothing wrong with that, and I play a useful role in the industry. But that said, there are people in this industry who can look at a handful of signals and sketch the shape of a possible future before the rest of us have found the whiteboard marker.

But as it turns out, visionary thinkers need people who understand where they are trying to lead and who want to help make the vision implementable. That part I understand very well.

A lot of my work has lived in the spaces between ideas and deployment: standards and operations, governance and architecture, strategy and the deeply inconvenient reality of existing systems. I like the point where a compelling idea has to survive contact with budgets, incentives, policy, legacy infrastructure, procurement, user behavior, and the occasional compliance team with a very sharp pencil.

The Identity Salon sits exactly in that space. It is not just about imagining where identity might go. It is about asking what would have to be true for those futures to work in practice.

What the Salon Is For

The goal is simple enough to describe and surprisingly complicated to operate: create a high-trust, vendor-neutral space for senior identity practitioners to talk candidly about the problems just over the horizon.

No sales decks or “thought leadership” theater. No one is pretending that a platform roadmap is an industry strategy. Just serious people talking seriously, under Chatham House Rule, about where identity is going and what that means for the systems we are all responsible for designing, deploying, regulating, securing, or explaining.

Ian had to step back as an official partner because of employer rules, which is one of those deeply practical realities that sounds boring until you are the person trying to make a cross-industry effort actually function. He still acts as an advisor, which we greatly appreciate. Andi and I are still running it, and we are expanding it.

Our current model is four face-to-face meetings a year, as many virtual meetings, and soon a monthly newsletter to keep the conversation moving between reports. That last bit is important because momentum matters. A Salon discussion should not disappear into a notebook until the next quarterly event. If people are giving us their time, attention, and trust, the output needs to be useful beyond the room.

What It Feels Like in the Room

The best Salon conversations have a particular texture: someone names a problem everyone has been politely circling, someone else says, “Yes, but that breaks in the enterprise,” and then the room starts pulling on the thread.

My favorite Salon moment so far involved everyone leaving their chairs to stand around the big screen, pointing at a proposed architecture and asking questions. I will not name names, though the person involved may well self-identify. It was less like a presentation and more like a PhD defense with twenty expert advisors all chiming in.

I wish we could have taken a photo of that moment. But, well, the Chatham House Rule is used for a reason.

That moment captured the point of the Salon better than any marketing copy could. The goal is not consensus, although consensus is lovely when it happens. The goal is to surface the assumptions before they become architecture. It is to find the weak spots, pressure-test the claims, and give people a place to say the things they are not ready to put on a conference slide.

The Unsexy Machinery Behind the Curtain

The reports are the part people see; I’d like to think they serve as a useful reference for people. The administrative machinery behind them is less glamorous, although possibly more character-building.

On the back end, we are figuring out legal corporate structure and tax information, which becomes non-trivial when the effort crosses national borders. We are jumping through hoops to make DNS work so that the majority of corporate spam filters do not quietly eat our announcements and then look innocent about it. Grrr.

I would love to say the hard part is the intellectual work. In practice, some days the hard part is convincing infrastructure built to prevent scams that our perfectly legitimate identity salon is not, in fact, a scam. Rude, but not entirely unfair. The mechanics of getting information out is, to put it bluntly, a PITA.

But let’s talk about the fun parts. Andi and I are paying close attention to conversations on the edges of the industry because those are often where the five-to-seven-year pain points first become visible. We are doing marketing and promotion to find subscribers. We are working through the business model so this thing can pay for the time we put into it. We are kicking off a newsletter because apparently “write more things” is the answer to everything. (At least it seems to be my answer to everything. Sorry Not Sorry.)

And then there are the reports themselves.

Those are drafted from hours and hours of specialized notes taken during the meetings, with enough care to make them useful while preserving the Chatham House Rule. That is a particular kind of brain exercise: capture the substance, preserve the disagreement, remove attribution, avoid flattening the conversation into mush, and still make the output readable by someone who was not in the room. And do it in real-time.

After that comes additional research, when and where it will help inform the output, followed by drafting, editing, typesetting, proofing, and the quiet prayer that no one finds a typo in the first ten minutes after distribution.

The work is significant because the conversations are significant.

What We Have Been Talking About

Since we started in October 2024, The Identity Salon has covered a fairly absurd range of topics. The list includes, but is not limited to:

• Death and the digital estate
• The convergence of identity and security
• Identity fraud detection and modern biometrics
• AI in IAM, including strategic implications, security concerns, and non-deterministic systems
• Governance of digital wallets, national IDs, mDLs, and verifiable digital credentials
• Delegation, authority, and emerging agentic trust models
• Model-based access automation and continuous identity
• Open IAM data schemas and interoperability
• Modern workforce identity issues
• Identity wallets in the enterprise
• Identity verification and proofing in the modern enterprise
• Practical and long-term implications of AI on identity and security

That list is a decent indicator of what the Salon is trying to do. We are not chasing one fashionable topic. We are looking for the connective tissue between topics that are often treated separately.

Identity proofing is not separate from wallets. Wallets are not separate from governance. Governance is not separate from delegation. Delegation is not separate from agents. Agents are not separate from authorization. Authorization is not separate from security architecture. Security architecture is not separate from enterprise reality, despite many slide decks’ best efforts.

The interesting questions tend to live in those seams.

The Questions That Keep Coming Back

What happens when identity systems become less deterministic? What happens when enterprise access decisions depend on signals that are probabilistic, AI-assisted, or derived from systems no one person fully owns? What happens when a digital wallet is technically sound but operationally awkward?

What happens when a person, organization, agent, delegate, or automated system can act with some kind of authority, but the IAM model still wants to know which “user” clicked the button?

These are not niche questions. They are very practical questions wearing futuristic shoes.

That is the space The Identity Salon is trying to hold. We want room for people who understand current enterprise constraints and still need to think beyond them. We want conversations that are grounded enough to be useful and forward-looking enough to matter.

We want the reports to help people notice patterns earlier, prepare better questions, and avoid being surprised by problems that were already visible from three conversations away.

What Comes Next

What is next for us? Growth, but the useful kind.

The Identity Salon is not trying to become a giant event. In fact, one of our operating constraints is that we never have more than 30 people in the room. That limit turns out to be critical; conversations work because people can speak candidly, challenge each other, ask unfinished questions, and trust that the room is curated for substance rather than volume.

That also means attendance is not one-to-one with paid subscriptions. We curate every in-person meeting to make sure we have the right mix of perspectives, experience, and problem spaces for the topic at hand. Paid subscribers are guaranteed to have their name in the hat for in-person events, and they receive the full reports and the newsletter. Free subscribers receive the executive summary, the newsletter, and invitations to virtual events.

This is a slightly odd model if you are used to the usual conference math: pay money, receive badge, collect tote bag, develop strong opinions about the coffee. But the Salon is not designed around maximizing attendance. It is designed around maximizing the quality of the conversation and the usefulness of what comes out of it.

We are looking for individual subscribers, corporate subscribers, and supporters for the reports and events. Subscriptions help us keep the work going, produce the reports, expand participation carefully, and make sure the Salon is not just a very elaborate hobby with invoices. Details are at theidentitysalon.com/sign_up.

What is next for me? Learning how to write newsletters people will actually read, which is both a craft and a minor act of optimism. I also hope to put more and more of my time into the Salon so that it becomes at least a third of my work going forward.

The identity industry does not lack events. It does not lack standards work or urgent, immediate operational problems. What it lacks, sometimes, is a durable place for senior practitioners to compare notes on what is coming next before “next” becomes yet another emergency.

That is the gap we are trying to fill.

Preferably with fewer DNS problems, but I am trying to remain realistic.

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Transcript

Every so often, I accidentally start a side project.

Sometimes it’s because I have a brilliant idea. Sometimes it’s because I have a stubborn idea.

More often, it’s because a few people I trust keep circling the same gap in the industry. Eventually, one of us says, fine, apparently we have to build this thing.

Usually, there’s scotch involved.

And this is roughly how the Identity Salon began.

The original conversation was between Ian Glazer, Andy Hindle, and me. We were talking about a gap in the digital identity industry, particularly for senior enterprise architects and the people who have to think several moves ahead.

Of course, there are conferences. Identiverse is a fabulous conference, and I say that with some bias, but also with a great deal of respect for what the event does well.

It focuses on the problems people are facing now:

• What’s breaking now
• What needs to be funded now
• What regulators are asking now
• What programs are trying to ship now
• What teams need to explain to leadership now

However, there’s another category of conversation that tends to happen in hallways over coffee or at the bar after the official programming ends.

Those are the conversations about the problems senior architects can see coming in the next five to seven years.

---

Why Five to Seven Years Matters

That timeframe really matters.

Five to seven years is not science fiction. It isn’t some theoretical someday.

However, it’s also not next quarter’s implementation crisis.

For senior enterprise architects, five to seven years is a completely reasonable planning horizon. In many cases, thinking about that horizon is quite literally part of their job description.

There are also other wonderful events, such as the Internet Identity Workshop.

IIW is one of the most important spaces in the identity ecosystem, and I will happily continue sending people there.

However, IIW is often highly speculative by design.

It’s an unconference. It’s a place where:

• Potential standards work can be explored
• New ideas can be tested
• Rough edges can be exposed
• Ambitious concepts can be debated in public

That work is necessary.

But it isn’t always what an enterprise architect needs when trying to understand how wallet ecosystems, AI-mediated access, delegation, fraud detection, and identity proofing might collide before the current roadmap is even finished pretending to be realistic.

So, we started the Identity Salon.

---

Creating a High Trust Space for Identity Leaders

The goal is simple to describe and surprisingly complicated to operate.

We wanted to create a high-trust, vendor-neutral space for senior identity practitioners to talk candidly about the problems on that five-to seven-year horizon.

That means:

• No sales decks
• No thought leadership theater
• No pretending a platform roadmap is an industry strategy

Instead, it’s serious people talking seriously under the Chatham House Rule about where digital identity is going.

More importantly, we’re asking what those changes mean for the systems we’re responsible for:

• Designing
• Deploying
• Regulating
• Securing
• Explaining

Ian had to step back this year as an official partner because of new employer rules. That’s one of those deeply practical realities that sounds boring until you’re trying to make a cross-industry effort function.

Andy and I are still running the Identity Salon, and we’re expanding it.

Our current model includes:

• Four face-to-face meetings each year
• Several virtual meetings
• A monthly newsletter to keep conversations moving between reports

That last piece is important.

Momentum matters.

A salon discussion shouldn’t disappear into a notebook until the next quarterly event.

If people give us their time, attention, and trust, the output needs to remain useful beyond the room.

---

Turning Vision Into Something Implementable

Part of why this work fits me better than I expected is that I don’t think of myself as a visionary thinker.

I don’t think that’s false modesty.

There are people in this industry who can look at a handful of signals and sketch the shape of a possible future before the rest of us have found the whiteboard marker.

However, visionary thinkers need people who understand where they’re trying to lead.

They also need people who want to help make that vision implementable.

That’s a role I understand very well.

A lot of my work has lived in the spaces between:

• Ideas and deployment
• Standards and operations
• Governance and architecture
• Strategy and existing systems

I like the point where a compelling idea has to survive contact with budgets, incentives, policies, legacy infrastructure, and the occasional compliance team with a very sharp pencil.

The Identity Salon sits in that space.

It’s not simply about imagining where identity might go.

Instead, we ask:

What would have to be true for those futures to work in practice?

---

Pressure Testing the Future of Digital Identity

The best Identity Salon conversations have a particular tone.

Someone names a problem everyone has been politely circling.

Someone else says, “Yes, but that breaks in the enterprise.”

Then the room starts pulling on that thread.

One of my favorite moments so far involved everyone getting out of their chairs and gathering around a large screen.

People were pointing at a proposed architecture and asking questions.

I won’t name names because, hello, Chatham House Rule.

However, it wasn’t really a presentation.

It was closer to a PhD defense with 20 expert advisors all chiming in.

That moment captured the point of the Salon better than any marketing copy ever could.

The goal is not necessarily consensus, although consensus is lovely when it happens.

The goal is to:

• Surface assumptions before they become architecture
• Identify weak points
• Pressure test claims
• Create space for unfinished questions

Most importantly, it gives people somewhere to say the thing they’re not yet ready to put on a conference slide.

---

Turning Chatham House Conversations Into Useful Reports

The visible outcome of the Identity Salon is the reports.

The administrative machinery behind those reports is less glamorous.

However, it may be more character-building for me personally.

Behind the scenes, we’re figuring out:

• Legal corporate structures
• International tax requirements
• Cross-border business operations
• DNS configuration
• Email deliverability

That last one has become particularly entertaining.

We’re jumping through hoops to make DNS work so corporate spam filters don’t simply eat our announcements and then look innocent about it.

I would love to say the difficult part of the Identity Salon is entirely intellectual.

In practice, some days the challenge is convincing infrastructure designed to prevent scams that the perfectly legitimate Identity Salon is not, in fact, a scam.

Rude.

But perhaps not entirely unfair, given the world today.

---

Capturing Complex Identity Discussions

Andy and I pay close attention to conversations happening at the edges of the identity industry.

Those edges are often where five-to seven-year problems first become visible.

At the same time, we’re:

• Promoting the Salon
• Finding subscribers
• Developing the business model
• Building a newsletter
• Producing reports

The reports themselves are drafted from hours of specialized notes taken during each meeting.

The challenge is to:

• Capture the substance
• Preserve disagreement
• Remove attribution
• Avoid flattening the conversation into mush
• Make the final report readable for someone who wasn’t in the room

That’s a particular kind of brain exercise.

And, increasingly, that’s my job.

Afterward comes additional research where it helps inform the discussion.

Then:

• Drafting
• Editing
• Typesetting
• Proofing

Finally, there’s the quiet prayer that no one finds a typo in the first ten minutes after distribution.

---

The Digital Identity Topics We Have Explored

The work is significant because the conversations are significant.

Since starting in October 2024, the Identity Salon has covered an almost absurd range of topics.

These include:

• Death and the digital estate
• The convergence of identity and security
• Identity and fraud detection
• Modern biometrics
• Artificial intelligence
• Digital wallet governance
• National digital identity
• Mobile driver’s licenses
• Verifiable digital credentials
• Open IAM data schemas
• Modern workforce identity
• Large-scale onboarding and offboarding
• Identity verification and proofing

The longer list is available in the written blog post.

However, even this shorter list reveals something important about the Identity Salon.

We’re not chasing a single fashionable topic.

---

Finding the Connective Tissue Between Identity Problems

Instead, we’re looking for the connective tissue between topics that are often treated as separate.

In reality:

• Identity proofing is not separate from wallets
• Wallets are not separate from governance
• Governance is not separate from delegation
• Delegation is not separate from AI agents
• AI agents are not separate from authorization
• Authorization is not separate from security architecture

The interesting questions often live in those overlaps.

For example:

• What happens when identity systems become less deterministic?
• What happens when enterprise access decisions depend on probabilistic signals?
• How should organizations handle AI-assisted identity decisions?
• What happens when no single person fully owns the systems producing a decision?
• What happens when a digital wallet is technically sound but operationally awkward?

These are not niche questions.

They’re practical questions wearing slightly futuristic shoes.

---

Creating Space for Five-Year Identity Problems

That’s the space the Identity Salon is trying to hold.

We want room for people who understand current enterprise constraints but still need to think beyond them.

The conversations need to be:

• Grounded enough to be useful
• Forward looking enough to matter

Likewise, the reports should help people:

• Notice patterns earlier
• Prepare better questions
• Understand emerging risks
• Avoid being surprised by problems that were already visible

The goal isn’t to predict the future perfectly.

It’s to become better at recognizing what may be coming.

---

Why the Identity Salon Is Staying Small

So, what comes next for the Salon?

Growth.

Hopefully, a useful kind of growth.

The Identity Salon is not trying to become a giant event.

In fact, one of our operating constraints is that we never have more than 30 people in the room.

That limit is intentional.

The conversations work because people can:

• Speak candidly
• Challenge one another
• Ask unfinished questions
• Trust that the room is curated for substance

We’re optimizing for the quality of the conversation, not volume.

---

How Identity Salon Participation Works

Attendance is not directly tied to paid subscriptions.

Instead, every in-person meeting is curated to create the right mix of:

• Perspectives
• Experience
• Problem spaces
• Subject matter knowledge

Paid subscribers are guaranteed to have their names in the hat for in-person events.

They also receive:

• Full Identity Salon reports
• The newsletter

Free subscribers receive:

• Executive summaries
• The newsletter
• Invitations to virtual events

It’s a slightly unusual model if you’re accustomed to traditional conference math.

Normally, you pay money, receive a badge, collect a tote bag, and develop strong opinions about the coffee.

The Identity Salon is different.

It is not designed to maximize attendance.

It’s designed to maximize the quality of the conversation and the usefulness of what comes out of it.

---

Building a Sustainable Identity Community

We are looking for:

• Individual subscribers
• Corporate subscribers
• Supporters of the reports and events

Subscriptions help us:

• Continue the work
• Produce detailed reports
• Expand participation thoughtfully
• Build a sustainable model

And, ideally, ensure the Identity Salon doesn’t remain a very elaborate hobby with invoices.

Personally, I hope to dedicate more of my time to the Salon.

My goal is for it to eventually represent at least a third of my work.

First, however, I apparently need to learn how to write newsletters people actually read.

Assuming I can get them through the spam filters.

That’s both a craft and a minor act of optimism.

---

Final Thoughts

The digital identity industry does not lack events.

It does not lack standards work.

And it certainly does not lack urgent operational problems.

However, what it sometimes lacks is a durable space for senior identity practitioners to compare notes on what’s coming next.

Ideally, before “what’s coming next” becomes yet another emergency.

That’s the gap we’re trying to fill with the Identity Salon.

Preferably with fewer DNS problems.

Although I am attempting to remain realistic.

---

Conclusion

The Identity Salon exists to create space for the digital identity conversations that don’t always fit into conference agendas or immediate enterprise roadmaps.

It brings senior practitioners together to pressure test ideas, surface assumptions, and examine the five to seven year problems already appearing at the edges of the industry.

The future of identity will not arrive as a single trend or technology.

It will emerge from the connections between identity proofing, wallets, governance, delegation, AI agents, authorization, and security architecture.

The earlier we understand those connections, the better prepared we’ll be when today’s future problems become tomorrow’s operational reality.

---