<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Hi Noel,<div>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 (<a href="http://wiki.openid.net/">http://wiki.openid.net/</a>) 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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>Cheers,</div><div>--David</div><div><br><div><div>On Jan 28, 2009, at 11:25 AM, Dickover, Noel, CTR, NII/DoD-CIO wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"> <div> <!-- Converted from text/rtf format --><p><b><i><font color="#008000" face="Arial">UNCLASSIFIED</font></i></b><i></i> </p><p><font size="2" face="Arial">Greetings,</font> </p><p><font size="2" face="Arial">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.</font></p><p><font size="2" face="Arial">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?</font></p> <br><p><font size="2" face="Arial">Thanks in advance,</font> </p><p><font size="2" face="Arial">Best,</font> </p><p><font size="2" face="Arial">Noel Dickover</font> <br><font size="2" face="Arial">DoD CIO, IT Investments and Commercial Policy Directorate</font> <br><font size="2" face="Arial">Social Software and Emerging Technologies</font> <br><font size="2" face="Arial">703-601-4729x152</font> <br><font size="2" face="Arial"><a href="mailto:Noel.Dickover.ctr@osd.mil">Noel.Dickover.ctr@osd.mil</a></font> <br><font size="2" face="Arial"> </font> </p> </div> _______________________________________________<br>general mailing list<br><a href="mailto:general@openid.net">general@openid.net</a><br>http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/general<br></blockquote></div><br></div></body></html>