Pattern: FacetMe

Summary	How do we maintain differentiation between the facets of our online identity that we build for different audiences.
Status	seed	Confidence	1
details...		Group	Digital Identities

Problem

In everyday life we perform a number of different roles across our professional and personal spheres of activity. These roles form individual and identifiable facets of our identity and in the physical world they tend to be managed as separate and bounded entities in natural and often unnoticed ways. When facets of our identity start to include an online component, particularly as we begin to use more and more social media and social networking tools and services it becomes increasingly difficult to manage these facets as distinct from each other. Professional and personal information can begin to overlap and controlling the identities we present to different audiences becomes more and more difficult. The major forces in play forces are the desire for aggregation versus the desire for compartmentalisation.

Context

Creating online profiles and spaces for professional and personal activities where one engages with different communities in different roles.

Solution

Construct faceted or compartmentalised identities for presentation to different audiences. Maintain discipline of switching between identities in order to prevent aggregation. This may mean cleaning up traces of previous online activity such as deleting unwanted or unneeded accounts and attending to the default sharing permissions that are set when one opens up accounts with open social tools and services. Begin private and progressively open to public.

Related Patterns

list other patterns related to this one, under categories such as component, assisting, conflicting, uses this, etc.

Alexander Pattern #127 - Intimacy Gradient: Conflict: Unless the spaces in a building are arranged in a sequence which corresponds to their degrees of privateness, the visits made by strangers, friends, guests, clients, family, will always be a little awkward. Resolution: Lay out the spaces of a building so that they create a sequence which begins with the entrance and the most public parts of the building, then leads into the slightly more private areas, and finally to the most private domains.

Progressive Disclosure (relates to Progressive Trust) http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ProgressiveDisclosure Present (or disclose) the most basic information and options first and progressively uncover more complexity as the user becomes more sophisticated. This increase in sophistication could happen over seconds (such as an advanced options button on a dialog) or years (such as the depth provided by a complex class library). Good ProgressiveDisclosure helps the user to become more sophisticated and does not hold the user back with intimidating options or by making it difficult to advance.

Notes, Links and References

Liabilities, potential risks, extensions, expected side-effects

Original authors: Mike Roch, Pete Johnston, Milan Milstan.

Contributions from Megan Smith, Steven Warburton

Licensing

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.