Spherical Cow Consulting

Businessman looking at an internet failure screen on a computer. He is in an office. Lack of resilience in tech opens the door to disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation.

Heather Flanagan
August 5, 2025January 13, 2026
Deep Thoughts, Podcast

Not Just a Technical Problem: Why Fighting Disinformation Needs Resilient Infrastructure

Disinformation. Misinformation. Malinformation. These terms get used interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing. That distinction matters when designing resilient infrastructure that supports trust. Most of our efforts to address these problems focus on content, activities like fact-checking, moderation, and takedown requests.

Artistic rendering of internet governance networking.

Heather Flanagan
July 29, 2025January 13, 2026
Deep Thoughts, Podcast

What WSIS+20 Taught Me About Digital Identity and Global Governance

I went to Geneva to understand what, if anything, people were saying regarding digital identity and standards in a governance-focused forum. My brain is now full. I adore the topic of identity and the standards development process; everything from the brilliant minds, the challenges, and the intense edge cases.

Many leather wallets on a colored pastel background. Top View

Heather Flanagan
July 22, 2025January 21, 2026
Deep Thoughts, Industry Ideas, Podcast

Kill the Wallet? Rethinking the Metaphors Behind Digital Identity

Much like "the cloud" or "the superhighway", the metaphor of a "wallet" has become convenient shorthand for a tangle of technical, policy, and usability decisions. As we keep building out digital identity ecosystems with verifiable credentials, identity wallets, and cross-jurisdictional trust models, I ask: is the metaphor still helping us?

Decorative image for cultural context (business woman overlaying chip design)

Heather Flanagan
July 15, 2025January 13, 2026
Deep Thoughts, Podcast

Local Flavors, Global Reach: Why Digital Identity Needs Cultural Context

What do you think of when someone says "digital identity"? Biometrics? Login credentials? A string of JSON data? Your social media account? The answer probably depends on where you are, how old you are, and/or how tech-savvy you are.

A three-person debate on the privacy considerations of identity verification with mobile driver's licenses.

Heather Flanagan
July 8, 2025January 13, 2026
Deep Thoughts, Podcast

When Verification Calls Home: Three Views on Privacy, Risk, and Digital Credentials

There’s been renewed attention lately on mobile driver’s licenses (mDLs) and the ISO/IEC specification that defines them. One of the more surprising aspects of the specification is that it allows the entity verifying a credential to contact the issuer directly in real time, a capability known as "phone home."

Heather Flanagan
July 1, 2025January 13, 2026
Deep Thoughts, Podcast

Resilience Isn’t Free: What Standards Can (and Can’t) Prepare Us For

Resilience is on my list of the top ten buzzwords of the year. Whether we’re looking at geopolitical turmoil, AI disruption, or yet another IdP outage, it’s clear that the infrastructure we’ve relied on for decades is straining under new (and not-so-new) pressures.

Delegation in a Multi-Actor World: It’s Not Just OAuth Anymore

Once upon a time, digital systems were built around a beautifully simple idea: one user, one identity, one device, one intent. That model worked, for some value of "worked." Mostly, it was good enough to solve 80% of the use cases.

Heather Flanagan
June 24, 2025January 13, 2026
Deep Thoughts, Podcast

Rethinking Digital Identity: What ARE Open Standards?

Since I wrote last week about MCP and the need for a more structured standards development process, this week I feel like diving into what it means to build an open standard. Unfortunately, "open standard" is a term that often gets thrown around and means entirely too many different things.

The process idea for moving MCP from a defacto standard to a reviewed standard.

Heather Flanagan
June 17, 2025January 13, 2026
Industry Ideas, Podcast

The MCP Bandwagon

MCP is 'an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to LLMs.' If we’re moving toward a world where AIs are expected to do All The Things, interfacing with our applications and services, then having a universal adapter that lets AIs talk to everything is undeniably powerful.

Heather Flanagan
June 3, 2025January 13, 2026
Deep Thoughts, Podcast

Acting on Behalf of Others: Delegation, Consent, and Messy Reality

Most digital systems were built around a simple model: one user, one identity, one device, one intent. If you need more than that, that's what password sharing is for, right? (Note: that was sarcasm.) Who needs delegation? Reality, which has definitely included sharing passwords, has always been messier.