[OpenID] Applicability of OpenID to Federal Govt Social Software sites (U)

[David Recordon]

Hi Noel,
I definitely think you're on track here with the idea of allowing  
people to login to the site using an account they already have  
elsewhere via OpenID.  The OpenID community uses a hosted wiki product  
(http://wiki.openid.net/) where people are able to sign in using  
OpenID to edit the pages versus most traditional wikis which first  
require that you create a new account.  This can be especially useful  
as people interact with more than one site within a community; for  
example, I can use the same OpenID to login to our wiki and blog/CMS.

In terms of the legal aspects, my understanding is that if you're  
still collecting personally identifiable information you'll want to  
make sure that OpenID users still agree to your terms of service.    
That said, using the OpenID Attribute Exchange Extension allows you to  
programatically request information such as their name, timezone, or  
email address so that they don't need to type it in.

In terms of current US Government implementations of OpenID the main  
one I'm aware of is that Change.gov supports OpenID sign in for  
commenting via the service Disqus.  I was also out at the Smithsonian  
last week where I learned about a project there which will be  
accepting OpenID sign in as well.

Cheers,
--David

On Jan 28, 2009, at 11:25 AM, Dickover, Noel, CTR, NII/DoD-CIO wrote:

> UNCLASSIFIED
>
> Greetings,
>
> I'm interested in knowing whether anyone has looked at using OpenID  
> for Federal government-based social software sites. I'm currently  
> working on implementing a wiki-based site for the US Department of  
> Defense called DoD Techipedia.  The external portion of this will  
> allow interaction between government officials and industry  
> representatives.  In looking at the larger issue, many people  
> working these issues in government are trying to work through the  
> potential privacy impacts of keeping public data on a government  
> website.  It occurred to me that perhaps we should be looking at  
> using something like OpenID for managing the external users to our  
> systems.
>
> The hope would be that if users manage their own personal data  
> through OpenID, the Federal Govt doesn't need to be responsible, or  
> liable, for it.  Am I on target here?  If so, what would be  
> necessary to make this happen?  Or more to the point, has anyone  
> already addressed this issue?
>
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Best,
>
> Noel Dickover
> DoD CIO, IT Investments and Commercial Policy Directorate
> Social Software and Emerging Technologies
> 703-601-4729x152
> Noel.Dickover.ctr at osd.mil
>
>
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