Unified Messaging Charter

Name
Unified Messaging Group

Purpose
To create common marketing and positioning messages with widespread community consensus to consumers and enterprises. Scope includes the state of identity technology, products, policies, and recommendations regarding the heterogeneous decentralized ecosystem of interrelated identity and security products and initiatives.

Principles
This working action group will operate by the Identity Commons principles along with the general principles derived to be consistent with:
 * the Seven Laws of Identity
 * the Principles of Identity published by the the international organization OECD.
 * the Magna Carta
 * the U.S. Constitution and U.S. Bill of Rights
 * European Identity and Privacy Laws
 * ITU-T17
 * Microsoft Privacy statement
 * Identity Management Task Force
 * Global Network Initiative

Any individual expert is likely to be wrong. The average of the experts' predictions often outperforms the individuals from whom the average is derived. See: "The Wisdom of Crowds" (James Surowiecki)."If you have impressive academic credentials and/or an impressive amount of experience, you should be alert to the possibility that you could still be profoundly wrong."

Practices
The following practices are to be followed by this working group:
 * Use the wisdom of the crowd to derive common messages
 * Emulate Abraham Lincoln as described in "Team of Rivals" (by Doris Kearns Goodwin). Lincoln insisted on vigorous debate and discussion, and an ability to tolerate dissent.

The primary output of this working group are the wiki pages
 * Wikis will be used for documents shared among members to edit
 * blogs, im, twitters, rss feeds will be used and linked

Requirements of Participation and How to Join
Membership in this working group is open to any individual or organization interested in the advancement of creating a common unifying marketing message.

Licenses and/or Restrictions on Usage of Work Product
All information on the wiki pages of this work group are available for use by anyone or any company.

Current Deliverables and Milestones
We will start with a conversation at this wiki site. If the conversation can be advanced by meetings, telcons, or a google discussion group, these communications methods will be used.

Current Meeting Schedule
t.b.d.

Current Stewards Council Representative and Alternate
Charles Andres started this group because there is a pressing market need for consistent messaging across this large decentralized ecosystem to help companies and individuals advance interoperable products and solutions for their own prosperity, and to maintain the human rights and freedoms discovered and declared in the physical world in the digital world.