[OpenID board] July 21, 2010 OpenID Board Call Minutes

[Mike Jones]

July 21, 2010 OpenID Board Call Minutes

Present:
Don Thibeau, Executive Director
Mike Jones
David Recordon
Daniel Jacobson
Marc Frons
Chris Messina
Nat Sakimura
John Bradley
Tony Nadalin
Nico Popp
Dermot O'Mahony
Dick Hardt
Joseph Smarr
Luke Shepard

Absent:
Brian Kissel
Andrew Nash
Pamela Dingle
Eric Sachs
Raj Mata
Allen Tom
Mike Ozburn
Rob Harles
Nataraj (Raj) Nagaratnam

Visitors:
John Ehrig, Global Inventures
Scott David, K&L Gates
Erin Hennessy, K&L Gates
Naveen Agarwal of Yahoo (sitting in for Raj Mata)


1.       Resolution of the Resolutions
Don proposed that we take a break on the restructuring topics until the fall, taking them up before the next round of board elections.  No objections were voiced.


2.       Trademark and Legal Research Report
Erin Hennessy of K&L Gates presented a deck on OpenID trademarks and issues.  Background was given on trademarks and certification marks.  Specific examples given for comparison purposes included Mozilla, the Open Source Initiative, and Creative Commons.  Possible future actions on the part of the foundation were presented and discussed.  Erin Hennessy recommends that we consider establishing and maintaining a strong brand identity.  [The legal content of this attorney/client privileged conversation has been intentionally omitted from the minutes.]  The board decided to have David Recordon, Nat Sakimura, Daniel Jacobson, and Dick Hardt work as a re-invigorated trademark committee with K&L Gates to recommend next steps.

[Luke Shepard joined the call at this point]


3.       Making working groups work
Dick asked what happened on the resolution to proceed with his contract to drive the v.Next work.  Nico Popp responded that he was concerned about brand confusion.  John Bradley said that he wished that he had been briefed about the conflict of interest issues of hiring a director before the initial vote.  Don suggested that the board keep open the possibility of hiring Dick at some future point to drive specification progress.  Dick stated that his goal would have been to drive consensus across the foundation.

David stated that leaders of the OpenID Connect working group are waiting until mid-August for people to get their IPR agreements in before starting work in the working group.

Nat reported that the Artifact binding working group has been working continuously.  They had been waiting on understanding what the OAuth 2.0 signature mechanisms would be.  Now that these mechanisms exist and appear to be stable, the group is working on how to incorporate them into the specification.  They are also talking with the OpenID Connect people because of the substantial overlap between the Artifact binding and the Connect proposal.

Joseph asked a question about whether there are issues for OpenID building specifications that are dependent upon specifications in development in other standards bodies - in particular OAuth 2.0 being done in the IETF.  No one raised any specific concerns for this dependency that the board needed to consider.  Some individuals with standards experience stated that these kinds of dependencies are common.  Dick pointed out that the main thing to watch for is whether the IPR policies of the standards we are taking dependencies upon are compatible with our policies and goals.  (In the case of IETF, people believe that they are.)


4.       Sustaining Member Renewals
Don reported that Microsoft, Yahoo, and VeriSign have renewed.  Luke reported that Facebook is renewing as well.


5.       Face-to-Face Meeting Scheduling
A face-to-face board meeting is being scheduled next to O'Reilly Gov 2.0 conference and IIW East in Washington DC in September.  Facebook plans to host an OpenID summit in November next to IIW and a face-to-face board meeting with be scheduled alongside those events as well.

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