[OpenID] New working group on account chooser concept

[ericsach1764 at comcast.net]

About 6 weeks ago a proposal for a new OpenID working group was submitted (see thread below) that would focus on the account chooser concept. That proposal was accepted, and t here is now a mailing list for the working group , as well as a site to post content from the working group . 




If you care about why it took so long, there were two main reasons. First, there is a generic really bad problem with posts to OIDF mailing lists being incorrectly marked as SPAM. That is why this message is being sent from a general mail account I setup instead of my regular email account. I've spent weeks trying to find a way to eliminate that problem, but had to give up for now. Instead for this working group I setup a mailing list on Google Groups. Hopefully in 2012 this false positive problem will be resolved and we can go back to an OIDF hosted mailing list. Second, I've been working with the OIDF's team from Inventures to transfer ownership of the accountchooser.com/org/net domains names. That only got resolved on Monday after weeks of dealing with domain registrars. 





I hope that many of you will be at IIW this week. I plan to run at least one session about the account chooser. In addition, Naveen Agarwal is going to lead another session on the next potential evolution of an account chooser that would store a list of accounts for the browser, as opposed to for an individual website. We have some techniques to propose for how to do that with an unmodified, but more recent browser, while still providing strong privacy/security controls. 


Whether or not you are at IIW, I hope you will consider monitoring or joining the discussion on this account chooser concept. If you do decide to join, make sure to review the OIDF's IPR policy and execute a contribution agreement . 




-- 

Eric Sachs | Senior Product Manager | esachs at google.com 



---------- Forwarded message ---------- 
From: Eric Sachs < esachs at google.com > 
Date: Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 10:47 AM 
Subject: Account Chooser working group charter submission 
To: openid-general at lists.openid. net 



At the last few Internet Identity Workshops there have been discussions about building a “cloud based” identity selector. The idea has been to mix the user experience advantages of Information Cards, the popularity of consumer identity providers, and still support large numbers of identity providers as InCommon has done. The end result is a user experience that is being called an “ Account Chooser .” 

A charter for a new account chooser working group was submitted today for review by the specs council. We plan to discuss it in more detail at the upcoming September 12/13 OpenID Summit hosted by Microsoft in Mountain View, CA. 


The end goal of this account chooser technique is to make the sign-in process as simple as a user clicking their picture from a list of accounts they frequently use on a website. 


greenAC.png




For example, Bonnie is on her mobile phone and wants to login to a website. She is shown a list of accounts including her personal account, her work account, and an entry for her husband who sometimes borrows her phone. She simply clicks the account she wants to use. 


If she had a new phone, or computer, she would need to add those accounts to the device, so she would see a screen like the one below where she could click her identity provider if it was listed. If not, she can simply type her email address. If there is a known identity provider for that email address, she will be redirected to it, otherwise she will be asked for her password on this site. 


greenadd.png






In preparation for the upcoming OpenID Summit we have started to build the accountchooser.com website with an overview of this user experience, as well as an initial implementor’s guide. A new mailing list will be created by this working group for further discussion once the spec council gives their approval. 

There are a few websites where you can currently experiment with an account chooser: 

    • Google now provides the option to opt-in to using an account chooser instead of Google’s traditional email/password based login box 
    • There is also a test site which lets you manually reconfigure your account after you login 
    • A sample e-commerce site is also available that uses an account chooser (though it is under construction this week, so it may be unstable) 
There are multiple ways to deploy an account chooser. The quickest option is generally to use a SaaS vendor who provides an account chooser as well as integration with popular identity providers. Current SaaS vendors in this category include the Google Identity Toolkit and Janrain Login Helper . Another option is to use a JavaScript widget that implements an account chooser, but then operate your own server side logic to integrate with identity providers. It is possible to use the Google Identity Toolkit in this mode, and other vendors may provide similar widgets in the future. 

-- 

Eric Sachs | Senior Product Manager | esachs at google.com 

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