[OpenID board] [CityCamp Exchange]

Don Thibeau (OIDF ED) don at oidf.org
Mon Feb 1 03:18:57 UTC 2010


Tim

The OpenID Foundation, like many organizations, has been a beneficiary of the Gov 2.0 Summit and now the CityCamp Exchange in Chicago. Key to the government's adoption of OpenID was the forcing function Gov 2.0 provided last fall.  Vivek Kundra deserves credit for seizing the Gov2.0 opportunity to leverage OpenID's widespread adoption in the service of the Obama administration's open government agenda. 

Many on the board share your view that the real promise of Kundra's "Open Identity for Open Government" initiative can be its impact at the state and local level, because as you point out it's where the rubber meets the road on citizen services.  As you say, it's an area of government that has the ability (unlike the federal level) to run experiments in parallel deserves the attention of open source protocol foundations like the OpenID Foundation and others. 

We are starting a dialogue with the State of California's CIO’s senior architects' efforts to create a digital identity for its citizens and certifying those identities. They have an interest in learning about the efforts of the OpenID Foundation at a Federal level in regards to certification and wanted to make sure CA's efforts at the State level were in concert with those of the Feds. This mirrors activity in British Columbia and reflects your interests in how states and cities can share best practices, data, and code.  The Foundations' mission around adoption dovetails with the information sharing you've championed and to not only avoid reinventing the wheel, but promoting open source identity standards by connecting the OpenID community with other forward-thinking communities.

Speaking of forward thinking, I enjoyed talking with Len Lin with CodeforAmerica. They and the team from the City of Austin seemed invested in OpenID enabling Austin's new websites and modeling the idea that open identity for open government at the local level. I like your notion of the OpenID Foundation partnering as a platform provider with orgs like CodeforAmerica to create facilities that are used by citizens to create value for society. To use your iPhone app store example, we want the OpenID Foundation and the new Open Identity Exchange to be a platform for the private sector and governments at the federal state and local level to leverage its infrastructure, best practices and open source focus for the benefit of as wide a community as possible.

Thanks for yours and Steve's encouragement and leadership.

Don Thibeau
don at OIDF.org
Executive Director
The OpenID Foundation
http://openid.net


-----Original Message-----
From: Tim O'Reilly [mailto:tim at oreilly.com] 
Sent: Friday, January 22, 2010 7:54 PM
To: citycamp at forums.e-democracy.org
Subject: [CityCamp Exchange] Introductions

I'm the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, and the organizer of the  
Gov 2.0 Summit and Gov 2.0 Expo.  I'm also on the board of  
CodeforAmerica. I'm interesting in spreading the idea that the real  
opportunity for next-generation government is not just in the use of  
social media, or open government data, or web APIs, or mobile  
applications, but in thinking like a platform provider, who creates  
facilities that are used by citizens to create value for society.   
Like the iPhone app store, I hope to see government as a platform for  
citizen-created applications.

  It seems to me that the real promise of Gov 2.0 is going to evolve  
at the local level, both because it's where the rubber meets the road  
on citizen services, because it's more insulated from partisan  
gridlock, and because it's an area of government that has the ability  
(unlike the federal level) to run many experiments in parallel.

As part of that vision, I'm extremely interested in how cities can  
share best practices, data, and code.  While a robust marketplace for  
experimentation is a feature of local government, fragmentation is a  
real risk.  Information sharing will hopefully help us to avoid  
reinventing the wheel, begin to develop standards, and forge a  
community of forward-thinking communities.

Some contact details below.  Also see http://gov2events.com and http://codeforamerica.org

See you all tomorrow!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tim O'Reilly, Founder & CEO O'Reilly Media
1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472
tim at oreilly.com, http://radar.oreilly.com, http://twitter.com/timoreilly





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