<div>Hi all,<br><br>Thanks for the thoughts. I think there could be some really interesting intersections between OpenID and Citizendium. I would suggest that we at Citizendium want to do what many sites will be wanting to do 2-3 years down the road (
i.e. connect real-world identities to online personas), so CZ could be an interesting conceptual example.<br><br>Our needs don't revolve around peoples' online reputations-- whether they have good karma on Slashdot, high ratings on eBay, etc. but on connecting off-line and on-line personas in a reasonably secure manner. A quick primer on Citizendium is that we're much like Wikipedia, except we require everyone to sign in under their real name, and we have a class of contributors called Expert Editors, who must be tenure-track professors (or equivalent). There are more differences, but those are the most relevant.
<br><br>So, right now authors are on the honor system (we ban obviously false names), but we manually confirm through requesting academia-hosted CVs that there's a good chance editors are who they say they are (i.e. they're applying under their real name and have the institutional affiliations and degrees they say they do).
<br></div><br>If there was an OpenID node that did the leg-work involved with this sort of verification and signed off on such metadata for the OpenID identities they hosted, that'd be fantastic for us and others. I realize OpenID is a decentralized system so ideally there would be several sites that could offer this sort of information (and sites would need to pick and choose what verification authorities they trust). I'd have to talk to our tech guys (and can't speak for the project as a whole), but I'd think Citizendium might be able to be one such site if it was an easy thing to set-up and we could benefit from the existence of other such sites. It'd be a very interesting value-add to adopting OpenID for us and others. We run MediaWiki, and I understand there's already an OpenID plugin for that.
<br><br>I'll be monitoring the <a href="mailto:general@openid.net">general@openid.net</a> mailing list (regarding Jonny Bufu's question, I think the OpenID mailing list is a good place to talk about this).<br><br>
Thanks, and I await your thoughts!<br>Mike Johnson, Citizendium<br><br><br><blockquote>Hello Mike,<br>thanks for your interest,<br><br>Johnny Bufu asks:<br>"would you be interested in having the discussion on the openid list, or
<br>rather on citizendium? "<br><br>Several responses are already on the OpenID list, which you can see here<br><<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://openid.net/pipermail/general/2007-February/date.html" target="_blank">
http://openid.net/pipermail/general/2007-February/date.html</a>><br>titled OpenId Chance II.<br><br>Depending on your answer, I will give you my 2 cent direct via email or<br>on one of these lists.<br><br>Thanks, Roland Sassen
<br><br><br><br>Hi Roland,<br><br>I'm Mike Johnson from the Citizendium Executive
Committee- thanks for the email about OpenID. It's certainly on our
radar, but our needs are a little different than those of most
organizations.<br><br>In short, we'd like a distributed identification system to provide
users with a common login across sites (as OpenID does), but, since we
also need to know people have the PhDs or MDs they say they do, we'd
like one that also has the ability to actually "authenticate" who users
are in the real world against some trustworthy authority.
<br><br>I suspect that OpenID could do such a thing, by allowing sites
like Citizendium to define other sites that we trust to verify that
users are who they say they are in the real world. However, in my
(somewhat limited) research on OpenID, I've never heard of this
happening.
<br><br>It's not absolutely necessary, but if something like this
could be set up it would be a large incentive for us to adopt OpenID.
Your thoughts? Know who'd be the best person to ask about this?<br><br>Best,<br><span class="sg">
Mike</span><br><br><br></blockquote>