After attending Debconf 9 in Cáceres, Spain, and talking to various people about their different approaches to validating identity, I have decided to change my approach to keysigning.

In order to sign your key, I must have met you before and can recall your face or name. If I have not met you before, I must have had an interesting conversation with you during this meeting, and am relatively sure I will be able to recall you in future meetings.

I will of course still need to look at government issued identification for people I don't know very well who fit into one of the two above criteria.

Part of the reason for this change is that for the second time, someone didn't want to sign my key because my New Zealand passport has the name "Penelope" (along with all other documents like my two driving licenses and Swiss B Permit). While I can understand this, to me it shows that the traditional method of verifying identity using government issued identification is fundamentally flawed. When I think about what comprises my identity, yes, my name is a big part of it, and I consider my name to be Penny. I have never in my life been called Penelope. Not by my family, teachers, colleagues, friends or lovers. It's just not part of my identity, and anyone who knows anything about me, probably knows that. So what are we trying to achieve by keysigning then? The fact that the person you meet is in control of that key, and you've verified their identity. Sorry, but "Penelope" doesn't go a very long way to make up any part of my identity.

Identity is something I've been thinking about a lot lately for various other reasons (largely after reading Simon Grant's book about the use of e-portfolios for personal information, personal development and personal values), and intend to blog about in the future.

At any rate, conferences like Debconf are a great way to meet people and have interesting and thought provoking conversations, and me being difficult and refusing to sign someone's key because I didn't know them, or hadn't had any sort of meaningful conversation with them, led to a few interesting and thought provoking conversations. So there's an added bonus.