[OpenID board] Facebook is renewing OpenID Foundation membership

Luke Shepard lshepard at facebook.com
Wed Jul 21 21:04:43 UTC 2010


As the quarterly Board meeting is this afternoon, David and I wanted to provide an update as to where Facebook is thinking both around its membership in the Foundation and goals for OpenID. We've decided to renew our sustaining membership.

While the recent votes show that there are a number of organizational issues still to work out, I still think that the Foundation is the best hope to create a unified identity standard across industries. Our hope is that the Foundation can also provide value to those technologists wanting to move OpenID forward. As part of that, David and I want to provide more resources - both time and money - to make OpenID a world-class identity foundation for the decades to come.

For the next six months, our plan is to foster the development of an identity layer on top of OAuth 2.0. This is the direction that the industry is moving in, and we think that if the OpenID Foundation doesn't play a leading role in its development, then it's not clear what the purpose of the organization is. Obviously this isn't the technical solution for every piece of the larger internet identity problem, but we see the Foundation as a place to lead progress across a number of industries.

Specifically, I think we need the following to happen in order to see progress and plan to make substantial contributions toward doing so:

- Start active work on the OpenID Connect spec by August 16. This gives ample time for those who wish to contribute to submit their IPR agreements.
- By end of year, we need several interoperable implementations in the wild.
- Build out excellent documentation, open source libraries, and other supporting materials for the Foundation's core technologies.

Facebook plans to do the following to help:

- Host a face to face Board meeting and tech summit at our campus in Q4 (likely November).
- Provide funding to the OpenID Connect working group in addition to any funding it may receive from the Foundation.
- Lead and contribute to technical discussions about the details of the identity layer (many of these have already begun).
- Ship an implementation of OpenID on top of OAuth.

Google has done a great job the past six months continuing to move OpenID 2.0 forward and working with the community to understand the missing pieces. It's our hope that we can do the same with OpenID Connect and that many of the company's represented within the Foundation will help to make it happen.

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