[OpenID] Three questions for candidates

Scott Kveton scott at kveton.com
Thu Dec 11 18:39:21 UTC 2008


Hi Kick,

Answers in-line.

> 1. Responsible for a 300K user insurance portal, give me three main business reasons to go for openid and convince my board.

Give this little information its hard to blindly say "here are the
reasons for going with OpenID" ... the reality is, OpenID isn't the
right choice for every single case.  Off the top of my head, I would
think and insurance portal probably manages sensitive information for
users.  We know there are serious security considerations when using
OpenID's that need to be taken into account.  In addition, if its an
insurance portal, the demographics are probably skewed across a wider
audience; its not necessarily a tech savvy crowd that is going to be
using this technology.  The last thing an insurance provider (or any
provider of pay-for-service) is going to want is users going "Huh?"
and then switching providers.

The two points from above (security and usability) are the biggest
priorities for OpenID and the ones we need to think seriously about in
2009 and come up with real solutions to them.  The other thing to
think about here is that OpenID is a foundational component of social
networking as a feature on the Internet.  Its just one component of a
broader solution set that is emerging.  We are seeing the first run at
this in the form of Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect.  There
will be open alternatives and this community and the technology we
have created around OpenID are a great place to start in building that
stack.

> 2. I see openid as a network product like gsm,water, adsl, atm or e-mail. What is your relevant experience in these type of projects to come to a turning point and bring openid to the mass

I know I differ from other candidates on this but I believe OpenID to
be like SMTP.  My mom got email, she didn't get SMTP.  The same will
be true with OpenID and to a greater extent "social networking" and
the open stack that evolves to enable it.  People will do "social
networking" on the Internet, they won't use "XRDS discovery to allow
their OpenID login in turn providing their Portable Contacts which you
can then push standard formatted activity stream elements to the wider
Internet".  It just doesn't roll of the tongue as nicely.  :-)
Seriously though, we're at a point with OpenID that we need to think
about a broader solution set and make the technology do that.

As for my experience, I think it plays well to what the community is
about to embark upon.  I founded the Open Source Lab that was focused
on helping community-based projects succeed when they started to reach
a critical mass.  We worked with projects like Mozilla when they spun
out of AOL, Apache, Drupal, Handhelds.org, Gentoo, Debian and
Kernel.org to deliver services they needed so they wouldn't have to
focus on things like hosting and could build better software.

Note: this was *not* the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) ... yes,
an unfortunate naming collision.  Its important to talk about the OSDL
as a model here.  From a corporate perspective, the OSDL was a
complete success.  Several large organizations came together to form a
not-for-profit 501c6 (not what the OIDF is today) to make sure the
Linux could be used in the enterprise safely and for all intents and
purposes they succeeded.  However, if you ask the members of the
technology community (the people who built the Linux kernel) they saw
it as a complete waste of resources and effort and most importantly it
served to alienate a large portion of that community.

The OIDF is at the same crossroads and we have an organization in
place that has an opportunity to both server the technology community
and the corporate community but its going to require some serious
thought into how we make that a reality.  This is why I'm running for
the board.

> 3. What candidate would you like to have in your team and why.

I'm a little confused by this question but I'm assuming you mean who
would I like to work with?  I think Eric Sachs has been an absolute
rock star over the past few months with the work that he's been doing.
 Yes, it will serve Google in their business but he's been completely
open and available to the community during that process.  Not only
that, he's got to be the most prolific author of content of anybody I
have ever seen ... :-)

- Scott



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