[OpenID board] November 5, 2020 Executive Committee Call Minutes

[Mike Jones]

November 5, 2020 Executive Committee Call Minutes

Present:
Don Thibeau - Executive Director
Mike Jones
Nat Sakimura
Bjorn Hjelm
John Bradley
George Fletcher

Absent:
(none)

Visitors:
Mike Leszcz - OpenID Foundation
Tom Smedinghoff - Locke Lord LLP
Lory Yeakel - Global Inventures


1.       Assisting the Executive Director Transition
Don reported on his and Mike Leszcz's actions to help us with the transition.  They reached out to OASIS and Global Inventures.  They reached out to Emma Lindley of Women in Identity, Andi Hindle of IDPro, and Julie Smith of the Defined Security Identity Alliance.

Don had committed to maintain membership and marketing momentum.  AWS, SailPoint, and ID4Me have joined the foundation.  We have interest from major financial players.  The speculation that major banks would join to influence FAPI hasn't panned out.  Our work with NGOs continues to raise our visibility and may result in landing new influential members.

We are considering sponsoring Vittorio Bertocci's "Identity Unlocked" Auth0 identity podcast in 2021.   We could non-exclusively sponsor individual podcasts or exclusively sponsor the season.  As an exclusive sponsor, we could work with Vittorio to help identify content for three sessions; we would have prominent brand placement.  The season sponsorship would be $4,500.  Mike Leszcz would own the relationship.  Mike Jones moved that we approve the exclusive sponsorship.  George Fletcher seconded.  The motion was unanimously approved.


2.       Liaison Updates
Global Open Finance Center of Excellence (GOFCoE) that is being formed out of Edinburgh proposes to work on formal proofs of identity standards, including FAPI.  GOFCoE wants to relist our certification results, as part of their listing other Open Banking certification results.

We are working to form an active liaison relationship with the Berlin Group.

The GSMA is working to determine where future Mobile Connect specification work will be conducted.  One option is to move the work to the MODRNA working group.  This would require resolving IPR constraints.  Or they could move it to a different part of the GSMA.  They would continue to work with MODRNA in either case.

The Distributed Identity Foundation (DIF) liaison relationship has been established, with Kristina Yasuda as our liaison officer.  We are working together on Self-Issued OpenID Provider (SIOP) extensions.

The Financial Data Exchange (FDX) intends to normatively cross-reference our FAPI certifications as part of their conformance program.  This is one of six identified organizations that intend to reuse outputs from our certification program.

ONC at HHS is creating the CARIN Alliance, which will have a liaison relationship with the OpenID Foundation.  We are working to have them use our certification results.

The UK Open Banking people want to reuse some of our certification results.

Tom and Don and Mike Leszcz are thinking about what protections we have from people screen scraping our content.  Don is working on a licensing agreement to protect our content.  We would work to provide value to our licensees.  We could maybe generate some revenue from these licensing relationships.

Tom said that we don't have significant copyright protection of our certification listings.  Data about current testing is proprietary to the OIDF.  Tom said that we could provide services to licensees.  One service could be real-time alerts about newly posted certifications.  There might be quality control services.  We could license the use of the OpenID logo on their cites.  We could grant a license for people to copy the certification listings wholesale.

For instance, FDX would prefer not to screen scrape.  The do want to know when changes occur.  They are interested in integrity and future-proofing.  They'd like to be part of discussions of how we change the indexing and presentation of our listings.

The FAPI working group has requested some changes in the listings of FAPI certifications.  There are regulatory requirements in the UK, Australia, Brazil, and Bahrain.

Mike Jones stated that there's a huge difference between copying listings and copying the underlying data (the .zip files).  He said that he's OK with licensees copying the list of results, provided they link to the OpenID Foundation's data and not copy it.  The EC agreed to have Don and Mike Leszcz and Tom continue investigations of licensing possibilities.

[ Lory Yeakel joined the call part way through the liaison discussions ]
[ Don and Tom left the call at this point ]


3.       Executive Director Transition Discussions
Lory Yeakel of Global Inventures shared her perspectives on hiring a new Executive Director.  Inventures does provide Executive Director services.  She worked with Don and Mike Leszcz to create a job description.  She said a full-service ED combines the functions that Don and Mike Leszcz have been performing.  There's both a spokesman and operational side of the job.  Some organizations have Inventures do all of this; in this case, Inventures typically fills the role with two people - a spokesman and an operational person.  Lory's materials included compensation and time commitment analysis.

[ Mike Leszcz left the call at this point ]

Lory said that we could move the line between what Don and Mike Leszcz do, so Mike takes on more tasks, freeing up some of Don's time.  Lory said that it's really hard to introduce new people when you can't have face-to-face meetings.  Changing executive directors is very disruptive.  Somebody new coming in wants to make a difference; this can be disruptive and there's a huge learning curve involved.  The learning curve is often a bumpy road.

Lory recommends that, rather than searching for a new ED, that we work with Don and Mike to move the line between the ambassador role and the administrative role.  Lory said that she's talked with Don about that possibility, and Lory said that she believes that Don is open to doing this.  She said that Don enjoys his ambassador duties and understands the value that he provides.  George said that he wanted to understand Don's expectations/desires from a time commitment perspective.  Lory suggested we sit down with Don and Mike and go over time period and time commitment expectations and goals.  Bjorn wants us to have this conversation with Don and Mike.  Bjorn said that we also need to be prepared to look for a replacement at the point we need to, especially if Don decides to commit to something else.

Lory said that if we are looking for a replacement, we should modify the job description to remove the operational stuff that Mike Leszcz is doing and to focus on the strategic roles.  The current job description is for a full-service executive director.

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