One Day LEFT for Early Registration

Chirs Messina highlighted this in a blog post yesturday – there is only one day left for early registration for IIW. He does a great job of summarizing the value:

The event started in 2005 and has become a staple of the identity community over the past several years, contributing to the emergence of technologies like OpenID and OAuth.

This year’s event promises to continue the conversations begun at the first and second OpenID Design Summits, and will, for the first time, delve into some of the activity streams work with which I’ve been engaged for over a year now.

Through April 1, you can register to receive the early bird rate.

Considering the caliber of folks who will be in attendance and the importance of the work that gets done there, IIW is definitely an event worth attending!

Significant work has also been done with the Information Card and Selector technologies – the Open Source Identity Systems group has been doing interop work at IIW for years.

REGISTER NOW

Internet Identity Workshop, the Identity Geekfest

This is a guest post from Eran Hammer-Lahav (published on his blog here too). He is frequent contributor to OAuth, Discovery, XRD, and other emerging community-driven specifications and standards, and currently working as Yahoo!’s Director of Standards Development.

There are few events more productive than Internet Identity Workshop.

And few that I enjoy quite so much. I’m an engineer at heart, even though these I play a pseudo-lawyer and write specifications. While I enjoy the meta conversations about the social web, I love talking code. The real thing, like working with a group of people on a new XML schema using a whiteboard, or walking through use cases and designing protocols. Ultra-geek stuff.

IIW, now in its 5th year is the central event for the identity community which includes OAuth, OpenID, XRD, Discovery, as well as the political and social conversations about them. It has been the place where OAuth Discovery was first discussed and shaped, where LRDD was presented and got its initial momentum, where XRDS turned into XRD, and where Yadis and many other OpenID ideas and proposals came from. And this is just the stuff I obsess about.

The event is an unconference like BarCamp, where the participants set the agenda, and what you have to say is as important as what you came to listen to and learn from. If you care about this space, and find this blog interesting, IIW is a must.

The next event, IIW2009A (there are two a year, usually May and December), is May 18-20, 2009 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. With everything going on in the identity space, it promises to be a great and productive event, even more than past years. I will be there presenting the latest specifications, ideas, and developments in OAuth, Discovery, XRD, etc. and plan to get some work done.

For more information, visit the event site, and if you register by April 1st, the fees are greatly reduced. And don’t forget to come and say hello.

How do we translate the power of identity technologies to the consumer web?

I asked Chris Messina to articulate from an open stack/DiSo perspective the  emerging key themes/topics interest for IIW. Here is what he had to say:

I think Dave Recordon’s recent post on O’Reilly Radar about “anatomy of connect” is interesting.

From the DiSo [Distributed Social Network Project] perspective, I’d like to see a broader narrative focused on thinking of identity, to some degree, as a given. That is, single sign-on is not enough, as evidenced by Facebook. We need to get past the period where we’re stagnating because there’s no valuable data attached to one’s OpenID.

If we really want to empower individuals and give them leverage over service providers (the VRM model), people actually need to have the ability to move their personal/public/private data around, and that means moving data interop formats forward.

Not just that, but from an ecosystem perspective, we do have to keep in mind what in it’s for consumers and relying parties. We have to solve this problem of having lots of providers and not enough relying parties. We also need to develop clear guidelines on the roles and responsibilities of both, and think about how we can help people evaluate different providers so they can make an informed choice when it comes to hosting their identity.

In other words, how do we translate the power of identity technologies to the consumer web?

Why Googlers come to IIW

This is a Guest Post from Eric Sachs from Google:

Google’s participation in  Internet Identity Workshop (IIW)  has grown from it founding in 2005 from a few lone individuals to the last IIW where we sent 15 googlers. The reason for this that Google has started to provide more APIs and developer tools for our application hosting business, we have found that standards for identity and security on the Internet are critical.  We send engineers to talk about standards such as OAuth, OpenSocial, OAuth, SAML, Portable Contacts, as well as longer term trends around discovery, malware, phishing, and stronger authentication.

We expect to have a similar sized group at IIW this year to discuss these topics, and more.  We will be sponsoring one of the breaks on each of the days to make sure people get enough sugary and health snacks to keep them going through the rest of the sessions!

We hope that other companies and individuals working in these areas will register to attend to IIW8 – 2009a  soon, and start building momentum for another great IIW unconference!  If you have not attended IIW in the past, but did attend either the Facebook hosted UX summit in Feb 2009 or the Yahoo hosted UX summit in Oct 2009, then you should definitely attend IIW to join in further discussions on those topics.

Google attendees: Dirk Balfanz, Nathan Beach, Breno de Medeiros, Cassie Doll, Brian Eaton, Ben Laurie, Kevin Marks, Betsy Masiello, John Panzer, Eric Sachs, and more to come

Related Community Events

There are two upcoming events by Identity Commons working groups -

The ID-Legal working group is putting on a conference April 14-15 in Washington DC to map the gap between the existing and emerging identity technologies and different legal lenses:

The Kids Online Working Group is holding it’s second conference May 31 just before the YPulse conference in San Francisco.  They are a great new group formed this past summer have been doing a podcast and holding regular conference calls.

Several Identity Commons working groups will be participating in Harnessing the Power of Digital Identity: 2009 and the Promising Road Ahead on April 20th at RSA – they include OSIS, Informationo Card Foundation, and the OpenID Foundation – and members of other groups like LIberty Alliance, Concordia and DataPortability and OAuth that also attend IIW are partticipating too.

Google on board as sponsor

Today Google came on board as a sponsor for IIW #8 – they are pledging more support then they have in previous years which in these economic times is a blessing – THANK YOU!

They will also be sending 10 people to participate in the workshop.

The other sponsor’s todate include:

• The Information Card Foundation (Google and Microsoft are both on the board of that foundation) One Break
• Plaxo Pre Dinner Reception both Nights
• Microsoft  Thursday Night Dinner

All their logos are in the side bar and on the sponsors page. We have all the sponsors of all previous IIW’s listed there.

What are the Biz Models?

At the last IIW there was a conversation about having a couple day special session of IIW just focused on “What are the business models of identity?” after looking at two different dates and locations we have decided to just weave the topic into this next IIW.  Bob Blakely wrote up the articulation of the landscape around this question….

Identity technology grew up inside the corporate enterprise. As long as identity remained a service provided by the HR or IT departments, all identity projects needed was a cost justification for the identity management project and procurement of any necessary hardware and software. There was, in other words, no need for an identity business model.

As enterprises have become more virtual, as businesses have begun to form partnerships which require them to be aware of identities of partner personnel, and as government and business have acquired more and more information about identities of customers and citizens, the need has arisen for identity services provided by third parties. But these third parties, unlike corporate HR and IT, cannot exist without business models.

Federated identity hubs, cloud-hosted identity service providers, credential vetting providers, and other identity provider businesses are beginning to emerge in response to the modern market’s identity needs. But business models in this space are not yet mature, and identity technology providers are not yet communicating well enough with identity providers and relying parties to enable them to produce the tailored offerings which will support new identity business models.

We are convening this thematic track inside IIW to bring together existing and potential identity providers to discuss business model issues inhibiting the growth of identity businesses, and to explore ways to overcome these issues.

Issues to be discussed will include business needs of identity relying parties, terms of service and quality of service requirements for identity services, issues of privacy and public perception, accuracy of identity information, usability and user acceptance issues, branding of identity services, models for monetizing identity services, and regulations, among other topics.

Existing identity technologies including federation, information cards, and OpenID may be discussed to the extent that they are relevant to business issues.

This thematic track at IIW will bring together business people whose organizations require identity services, identity service provider executives, product managers responsible for product strategy at large companies, potential adopters of identity technologies, and venture capitalists.

Lodging

We’ve secured a conference rate of $179 at the The Hotel Avante (650.940.1000). When you call, just tell them that you are with IIW. Tthe community enjoys this hotel.  You can also register online. Please register early since there are limited rooms available.

The Hotel Avante has free transportation to the Museum, broadband connectivity in all of its rooms and the entire facility is otherwise wired for WiFi. They have a beer and wine happy hour and they’re pretty flexible with the bar area. This time, they’re including a hot breakfast in the rate. Its a good place to hold informal meetings after dinner.

As a cheaper alternative, the Avante has a sister hotel called the Wild Palms that’s available for $129. This reservations link will give you access to the conference rate.

There are also some other nearby options:

Hilton Garden Inn in Mountain View (650.964.1700). If I remember right, this is more or less across the street from the Avante.

Santa Clara: Marriott, 7 miles from Museum Hilton, 8 miles from Museum

Sunnyvale: Sheraton, 4 miles from Museum

Palo Alto: Sheraton, 7 miles from Museum Westin, 6 miles from Museum

Here  is a Map with the museum and all the hotels.