[OpenID] a small piece of history

[Brian Kissel]

+1, many thanks to John and others who have been instrumental in our success to date.

Also, a huge thanks to Don for his leadership in making the past week at the Gov 2.0 Summit such a huge success for the OpenID Foundation and its members.  When Don joined as the Executive Director, the government opportunity wasn't even on the radar.  He responded to the opportunity thoughtfully and aggressively to ensure that OpenID had a seat at the table for discussions on how to leverage industry standards for citizen engagement and government transparency.

Lastly, a big thanks to Google, Yahoo, Verisign, PayPal, and AOL, who announced their plans to support this initiative as the first OPs to be certified for use on government websites.

As Don has said, there is a lot of work still to go, but IMO the OpenID Foundation and its members have done a great job responding to this important opportunity to increase visibility and credibility for the OpenID initiative.

Cheers,

Brian
___________

Brian Kissel<http://www.linkedin.com/pub/0/10/254>
CEO, JanRain - OpenID-enable your websites, customers, partners, and employees
5331 SW Macadam Ave., Suite 375, Portland, OR 97239
Email: bkissel at janrain.com<mailto:bkissel at janrain.com>     Cell: 503.866.4424     Fax: 503.296.5502

From: openid-general-bounces at lists.openid.net [mailto:openid-general-bounces at lists.openid.net] On Behalf Of Don Thibeau (OIDF ED)
Sent: Monday, September 14, 2009 9:27 AM
To: openid-general at lists.openid.net
Subject: [OpenID] a small piece of history

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<mailto:don at OIDF.org>
Executive Director
The OpenID Foundation
http://openid.net



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