[OpenID] a small piece of history

[Don Thibeau (OIDF ED)]

On behalf of the Board of Directors of the OpenID Foundation, I want to
thank John Bradley for his leadership in the technical development of US
government support for OpenID.  John worked with Andrew Arnott, George
Fletcher, Johnny Bufu and many others in a months-long collaboration on the
GSA profile for OpenID. Their work reflected a community-wide contribution
to OpenID and an important step forward for the open identity ecosystem.  

 

CIO Vivek Kundra and government technical teams made sure to mention how
impressed they were by the interchange with their counterparts in the
private sector. They were amazed the profile could be finalized with so
little friction from contributors from competing companies.  Government
officials from the White House, the GSA, OMB, DOD and Homeland Security went
on record at Tim O'Reilly's Gov 2.0 and other public forums last week in
support of the open source technology that enabled this next pilot phase.
Getting identity providers and OP's ready hasn't been easy as the profile
kept moving as government processes kept intruding.

 

The government's request of the foundation was a forcing function that drove
collaboration and resource sharing with InCommon and the Information Card
Foundation. To be sure the integration testing exposed challenges in
technical documentation of libraries and best practices.  The expansion of
pilots in the next phase of this "mother of all use cases" will continue the
stress test.  It will force the open identity community to engage on how
best to mature open identity interoperability and how to best resolve well
known challenges in usability, security and privacy.

 

Press releases are rarely a source of truth but the public reaction to the
Government's support of OpenID points to its key role in the evolution of
open identity collaboration.  Many saw a small piece of history made in a
user centric and federated identity adoption curve.  Pilots and beta tests
are inherently risky; especially in the next public, high profile, path
forward with the government.  Public private partnership is hoped for but
seldom seen so clearly in the progress made last week.  The OIDF and ICF
foundation boards continue to work together. All that was at play in the US
CIO public thanks for a small but significant step toward open identity's
contribution to open government. 

 

Don Thibeau

don at OIDF.org

Executive Director

The OpenID Foundation

 <http://openid.net> http://openid.net

 

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