As far as the technical side of identity systems go, I think this touches on a point you made in another post, which I’ve also made a lot in design meetings and elsewhere:

Make things to stretch and break. Make things flexible. Make things simple.

We are creating for people not robots now.

There’s no reason in the world why you need to have one owner on a resource. There’s no reason why you can’t build your database and overlying system code to handle two-way streets and more complicated social structures (without making the system any harder to use). It’s just, the people who have been designing these systems don’t think like this.

One of the great things that seems to be happening in computing, at least on the web, is the move from making interesting technologies to doing interesting things that happen to use technologies. The next innovations and revolutionary features in applications are human ones, not code. This kind of thinking leaves us with more useful tools that can be used in a wider set of contexts – and in some ways represents social Internet applications coming of age.

http://hybridvigor.org/2008/10/12/money-cant-buy-you-trust-what-we-wont-be-getting-for-1-trillion/#more-181

Most of the software in use reinforces “what’s mine & what’s yours” interactions, with very little emphasis on “ours.” It feels natural to think in those terms. Even the notions of B2C and B2B imply a Mine2Yours attitude. The problem is that relationships are rarely that conveniently simplistic.

For example, the Law of Relational Symmetry you referenced discusses how Org 2 Person relationships are slanted by their very constitution. Organizations aren’t people. Organizational behavior is vastly different from individuals’ behavior. Organizations and natural persons have different legal footing. So a B2C relationship is a very complex thing that can’t be expressed in simple mine/thine terms.

But even interpersonal relations are complex. When 2 people get together and sign a contract, there’s usually a witness, an enforcer, an arbiter, or some system to ensure the contract is carried out to the satisfaction of the parties. These ancillary roles factor into the relationship, as well. When two people are married, it’s romantic to think of the couple as being the only ones in that relation. But then were does the marriage license come from? A marriage license is proof of a societal interest and involvement in that relationship.

So how do participants in a relationship come to trust each other and collaborate? Well, if you frame the problem in those terms, you have decades of research to fall back on. The fields of collaborative action theory, cooperation theory, common pool resource (CPR) management, and game theory have a lot to contribute to the discussion.

One of the multitudinous howls of recent financial turmoil illustrates: “hedge funds” were fairly recently made legal in part because of a representation that they would only be open to rich people playing with their own money: let ‘em take what risks they choose. But when these funds collapsed, they were discovered to have been using, and to have untraceably misplaced, money from pension funds and other kinds of “not their money.” Many people find this outrageous. Why? Because they did not expect mere “symmetry” in the relations: people who expect to need their pensions, perhaps even soon, are inherently more risk-averse than people with extra millions lying about to play with.