Digital Estate Planning

As I write this post I’m settling back into my office after the trip to San Francisco / Mountain View for Digital Death Day 2010 (DDD2010).  DDD2010 was sponsored by Entrustet, Legacy Locker, and Data Inherit.  This landmark event brought together a collection of people involved directly with the creation, management, protection, and transfer of digital assets.  The event was organized by Kaliya Hamlin (www.identitywomen.net) and her team.  They did an outstanding overall job with the event.  I believe this maiden Digital Death Day voyage will represent a significant, historical event when we look back on it in the coming years.

One of the attendees and participants, Evan Carroll, (www.thedigitalbeyond.com) has provided a nice recap of the event in his post Digital Death Day:  Good People.  I couldn’t agree more with Evan’s recap and specifically the quality of the participants.  Digital Death Day was structured as an unconference, which, according to Wikipedia is “a facilitated, participant-driven conference centered on a theme or purpose.”  That is a fair description from my perspective.  The session began with all of the participants coming together for a round of introductions.  The participants then had the opportunity to offer sessions of interest throughout the remainder of the day.  So we as a group set the agenda and facilitated all of the discussions.  I intentionally refer to the sessions as discussions because this wasn’t a typical conference where one person speaks/lectures and the attendees listen.  Instead the sessions were full of collaboration and good spirited debate.  In the end many questions were answered, many questions were not, and many more questions were discovered.

Throughout the day we spent a great deal of time discussing the foundational, legal issues in regards to digital assets.  Primary these discussions focused on the definitions of property.  Unfortunately, as I’ve mentioned before, the reason why digital assets raise such important estate planning issues is that the traditional definitions of property do not fully address technology and Internet related issues.  The basic question of what is a digital asset is not easily answered as we sit here today.  That fact compounds the estate planning issues because we first need to know ‘what we own’ before we can develop an estate plan that distributes or disposes of ‘what we own.’

It was a pleasure to meet everyone at Digital Death Day.  It was a great group of people that are ready and willing to effect change in the area of digital estate planning and the digital afterlife.  I came back from DDD2010 with a number of ideas and topics to explore in the coming weeks.  Please check back, subscribe, and/or follow me on Twitter to keep up with the developments.  As always, your feedback is important and welcomed at any time.