The Center has undergone a landmark restoration to its former glory of the 1927 Renaissance Revival design, with adaptations to serve a broad range of modern needs and environmental retrofitting.  The special event space is where we are hosting the Internet Identity Workshop.

We are making sure there is going to be adequate wifi for the event with Jump Labs sponsoring that aspect of the conference.   Just as we do in our regular IIW we will be having a barista for most of the 2 days.

Dinner Thursday evening will be hosted thanks to Booz Allen Hamilton who is sponsoring AND we will be having a bus transport people from the venue to our dinner location that will be even closer to a metro then IIW.

We know it is quite different then our usual home on the west coast at the Computer History Museum however we think it will prove to be a great starting point for future events on the East Coast.

The Tenth Internet Identity Workshop in May, 2010 was the largest ever. We have had inquiries from community members on the East Coast of the US and in Europe have been lobbying us to bring the event to their locations.  We are happy to confirm that we are going host IIW’s in Washington, DC  and London.

WE NEED YOUR HELP! Please take some action if you like IIW and are reading this. IIW is been about the community that attends and participates year round in the activities of groups that use the event to get real work done and move the industry and vision of user-centric identity that works for people forward.

So with these events upcoming Phil, Doc and I need your help in spreading the word to your collegues on the East Coast and in Europe who would enjoy the event.

To help you do this we have several tools and options.
Blog badges for specific events. (These are two of them their are more on the wiki)

For IIW-East September 9-10 in Washington DC

• A Venue! the Josephine Butler Parks Center (a 10min walk from the Columbia Heights Metro)
• an Invitation up online
• Registration is up here
• an invitation designed to be send via e-mail
• IIW Twitter List for IIW-East
• RSVP on Social Networks - LinkedIN, Upcoming, Facebook

For IIW-Europe, October 11 in London we have

• A still being developed invitation up on the IIW site
• Registration is live Early bird ticket sales end August 31
• RSVP on Social Networks: LinkedIN, Upcoming, Facebook
• Twitter List (it will be a bit small until we have more registrations)

For IIW #11 in Mountain View, November 9-11

• We have a simple invitation up online
• Registration is live Super Early bird ticket sales end August 31

If you value IIW and the conversations that happen there please take some initiative and reach out to colleagues to spread the word about these events.  Because of the community focus of the events we  rely strongly on community word of mouth to let people know about them.

It would be great to have community ideas put forward for the main IIW invitation articulating the current foci of conversations.

November 9-11

Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA

Registration

The Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) is a working group of the Identity Commons and has been convened in California semi-annually since 2005. The 10th IIW was held this past May and had the largest attendance thus far.

Internet Identity Workshops focus on “user-centric identity” addressing the technical and adoption challenge of how people can manage their own identity across the range of websites, services, companies and organizations with which they interact.

We will be posting more information about specific topics here.

About IIW
Unlike other identity conferences, IIW’s focus is on the use of identity management approaches based on open standards that are privacy protecting. It is a unique blend of technology and policy discussions where everyone from a diverse range of projects doing the real-work of making this vision happen, gather and work intensively for two days. It is the best place to meet and participate with all the key people and projects going on in the field.

The event has a unique format – the agenda is created live the day of the event. This allows for the discussion of key issues, projects and a lot of interactive opportunities with key industry leaders.

RSVP on Social Networks:  LinkedIN

How does it work?
After the brief introduction on the first day, there are no formal presentations, no keynotes and no panels. After introductions we start with a blank wall and, in less than an hour, with a facilitator guiding the process attendees create a full day, multi-track conference agenda that is relevant and inspiring to everyone there. All are welcome to put forward presentations and propose conversations.

We do this in part because the field is moving so rapidly that it doesn’t make sense to predetermine the presentation schedule months before the event. We do know great people who will be there and it is the attendees who have a passion to learn and contribute to the event that will make it.

The event compiles a book of proceedings with all the notes from the conference. Here are the proceedings from IIW7, IIW8, IIW9 & IIW10. BTW these three documents are your key to convincing your employer that this event will be valuable.

The First IIW-Europe

October 11, 2010 London

University of London, MacMillan Hall

Registration is now open 

RSVP on Social Networks: LinkedIN, Upcoming, Facebook 

The Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) is a working group of the Identity Commons and has been convened in California semi-annually since the fall of 2005. The 10th IIW was held this past May and had the largest attendance thus far. There have been many requests to have an IIW come to Europe, and now the emerging interfederation at the European scale is providing a timely basis to have one in London. This event immediately precedes RSA and has the theme of Identity Across Borders and Sectors. 

IIW’s focus is on “user-centric identity” or “user-driven identity” – addressing the technical and adoption challenge of how people can manage their own identity across the range of websites, services, companies and organizations with which they interact.  The focus of this first IIW-Europe will be on the whole range of global and European initiatives in this space. 

• Mydex
• UK online identity
• Stork
• PV Net
• German ID Card
• Various national ID schemes
• Various loyalty schemes
• TRM Project
• National e-Identity Programmes
• European eID Interoperability Platform (STORK)
• OpenID
• IMI Information Cards
• Personal Data Protection and the Digital Economy
• NIH pilot adoption of Open Identity technologies
• Certification of industry open identity credentials
• Business models for higher LOA open identity credentials
• Government, Commerce and Research and Education Identities
• Re-engineering of multiple major services (health, benefits, pensions, tax)

• What are the business cases for the adoption of Open Identity Technologies
• What are the new legal constructs that make this work
• How to use open identity technologies to preserve privacy while providing personalization
• Data Protection Directive and Privacy Issues
• Personal Data – how is it stored and shared with end users
• Personal, Non-Personal and Potentially Identifying Information
• How are these new approaches regulated?
• Online Identity: moving beyond the current ‘privacy’ debate to smart information sharing
• Personal Data Stores and the challenges they will drive

Technical Issues:

• What software is available to leverage open identity standards
• Open identity standards (identity and semantic)
• How different standards and technical implementations interoperate
• How agencies can accept identity credentials generated by other organizations
• How open identity technologies can enable your website to move beyond brochure ware, without using cookies
• How to leverage open identity technologies in your technology roadmap
• How to implement Federated Identity
• Technology issues involved in implementing existing Identity Management technology
• Lessons learned – what are the most effective ways for Federal Agencies to build and employ identity systems
• Scalable Trust

New Industry Developments:

• Personal Data Stores/Data Banks with our digital footprints recorded
• What new Identity Management technologies are on the horizon
• Strategy  for trusted identities in Cyberspace

Please join us for IIW Europe

To consider all these topics and more!

Register Here

September 9 and 10*, 2010

Josaphine Butler Parks Center

Theme: Open Identity for Open Government.

Register Here!

RSVP on Social Networks - LinkedIN, Upcoming, Facebook

The Internet Identity Workshop has been held semi-annually in California since the Fall of 2005. The 10th IIW was held this past May and had the largest attendance thus far. There have been many requests to have an IIW on the East coast, and now the Open Identity for Open Government Initiative and the recently released National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace is providing a timely incentives to have one in Washington. This event immediately follows the Gov 2.0 Summit

IIWs focus is on “user-centric identity”, addressing the technical and adoption challenge of how people can manage their own identity across the range of websites, services, companies, government agencies and organizations with which they interact. IIW-East will focus mainly on the government adoption of open identity technologies for use by government websites.

The event has a unique format – the agenda is created live the day of the event. This allows for the discussion of key issues, projects and a lot of interactive opportunities with key industry leaders.

The event compiles a book of proceedings with the notes that are gathered from the conference. You can find the Book of Proceedings for IIW7, IIW8,  IIW9 & IIW10 here. BTW these FOUR documents are your key to convincing your employer that this event will be valuable. As attendees register we ask about topics they wish to discuss.

Providing identity services between the general public and government websites is a different problem than providing authentication and authorization services within one or a few organizations (enterprise provisioning/termination or federation between two companies or government agencies).

As a community we are exploring these kinds of issues:

Questions Agencies Face:

• How can open identity technologies enable open government
• How can agencies leverage identity credentials generated by other organizations
• How can the government  leverage the efforts of social networking sites that offer user-centric identity credentials
• What are the advantages to agencies of adopting open identity technologies
• How can open identity technologies enable your websites to move beyond brochure-ware
• How can we increase the speed in which government organizations can benefit from the use of open identity approaches
• How to manage Federated Identity on an ever increasing scale
• What are the implications of National Strategy for existing policy mandates
• Should there be integrated political architecture
• There are five distinct Cyber Security Bills in Congress now – what are the implications

Policy  Considerations:

• The relationship between FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards) and identity management
• What are the business cases for agencies to adopt Open Identity Technologies
• What are the new legal constructs that make this work
• How to use open identity technologies to preserve privacy while providing personalization
• GSA standards for the use of open identity technology
• Data Privacy Issues
• Personal Data – how is it stored and shared with end users
• How are these new approaches regulated

Technical Issues:

• Open identity standards (identity and semantic)
• What software is available to leverage open identity standards
• How different standards and technical implementations interoperate
• How agencies can accept identity credentials generated by other organizations
• How open identity technologies can enable your website to move beyond brochure ware, without using cookies
• How to leverage open identity technologies in your technology roadmap
• How to implement Federal Identity
• Tecnlogy issues involved in implementing existing Identity Management technology
• Lessons learned – what are the most effective ways for Federal Agencies to build and employ identity systems

New Industry Developments:

• Personal Data Stores/Data Banks with our digital footprints recorded
• What new Identity Management technologies are on the horizon
• National strategy for trusted identities in Cyberspace

Please join us at the Internet Identity Workshop

To consider all these and more!

* We realize that these dates conflict with a Jewish holiday. We had already set the date and committed to a venue before we realized this and were unable to change it.  We will be more conscious of checking forthcoming dates against major religious holiday calendars.

Theme: Open Identity for Open Government.

Register Here!

Internet Identity Workshop East (IIW-East) is September 9-10, 2010 in Washington DC at the Josephine Butler Parks Center.  This event immediately follows the Gov 2.0 Summit.

The Internet Identity Workshop has been held semi-annually in California since the Fall of 2005. The 10th IIW which happened in May was the largest thus far. There have been many requests to have an IIW on the East coast, and now the Open Identity for Open Government Initiative is providing a timely basis to have one in Washington.

IIWs focus on “user-centric identity”, addressing the technical and adoption challenge of how people can manage their own identity across the range of websites, services, companies, government agencies and organizations with which they interact. IIW-East will focus mainly on the government adoption of open identity technologies for use by government websites.

Paul Madsen inspired by this tweet sent us this cartoon.

We still have IIW stickers so be sure to get some next week!

If you can’t make it and you send us your address (identitywoman@gmail.com subject line  STICKER) I will mail you a few after the conference.

Time: 8:30am – 6pm

Meeting Host: Yahoo 701 First Ave Sunnyvale, CA 94089 Building E Classroom 9

Agenda: Discussion of open issues around OAuth 2.0. The latest version of the OAuth 2.0

If you have feedback on these dates before we “set them in stone” please give us feedback in the next week.

Thanks.

Kaliya, Phil and Doc.

The PDF of all the notes complied into one document can be found here

Internet Identity Workshop 10 is May 17-19.
Registration is Open Now and Extra Early Bird Rates are in effect until January 31.

We just crated a Slideshare account for IIW!
Paul Trevithick sent us his slides from the opening day. We are happy to post any other slide shows from IIW too.

The Internet Identity Workshop #9
Tuesday – Thursday, November 3-5
in Mountain View, CA Computer History Museum

Please blog/tweet about the conference. The hash tag is #iiw , our twitter handle is @idworkshop

Proposed Topics List is here. We all make the agenda together beginning at 1 on Tuesday and again on Wednesday and Thursday morning.
If you want to know more about how to prepare for an unconference check out this piece called “unconferencing” by Kaliya Hamlin (@identitywoman) the facilitator of the workshop.

You can see the specific times of sessions.

Tuesday Morning Opening talks will cover:
* The Identity Trust Framework activities – Drummond Reed and Don Thibeau
* Data Portability releasing their EULA work
* Action Cards – Phil Windley and Paul Trevithick
* Discovery etc. – Eran Hammer-Lahav
* Activity Strea.ms etc. -
* A VRM update
* We might cover activity happening in the healthcare sector
* We are working on having Vivek Kundra the CIO of the US join us via skype – as yet this is unconfirmed.

They won’t cover – OpenID 101, Information Cards 101 or SAML 101
If you are unfamiliar with these topics we recommend reading these papers/watching these videos. There is a lot of information online covering these topics on the foundations/organizations respective websites.

OpenID – http://openid.net/
OpenID video about it – http://www.youtube.com/

Information Cards - http://informationcard.net/
Video - http://informationcard.net/watch-the-video

SAML – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Assertion_Markup_Language
Video – Ping Identity on SAML 101

All together now – the Venn of Identity
The paper – by Drummond and Eve
the update – The Zen of Venn

Demo Hour:
We still have Demonstration slots available you must sign up ahead of time to Demo.
It is Wednesday after lunch short 5min demos will be happening throughout the hour – throughout the room.
Please e-mail Kaliya[at]mac.com to get a table and more information about how it will work.

Food:
I forgot to ask if there were any special dietary requirements.
Please let me know if you have any – this is what we have in store for you.

Tuesday – Burrito Bar, Tied House
Wednesday – Indian, Italian
Thursday – BBQ Boys

Thank you to our Sponsors:

Without their contributions this conference would not be possible.
(we still have sponsorship opportunities available)

<a href=”http://www.internetidentityworkshop.com/sponsors/”>
<img src=”http://www.internetidentityworkshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/IIW9Sidebar.jpg”>
</a>

About the Notes Taking Procedures:
In our effort to document the whole confernece and give all attendees access to all the happenings in sessions we have a notes taking procedure:

If you convene a session it is your responsibility to get a note taker for your session.

The note taker needs to use the NOTE TAKING FORM – found here in digital form (the paper version will be avaliable in each break out space too).

When notes are complete, the note taking form must be e-mailed to iiwnotes@gmail.com
OR transfered to a USB key at Documentation Center
OR if paper notes are taken transcribed by the notes taker on computers provided in Documentation Center

We will also be collecting a more immediate list of results from each session on 11×17 sheets.

We are looking forward to seeing you next Tuesday!

let us know if you have any other questions,

-Kaliya, Phil and Doc

Eric Sachs from Google wrote this:

Google has a large set of engineers who attend IIW  to discuss standards such as OAuth, OpenSocial, OpenID, SAML, Portable Contacts, as well as longer term trends around discovery, malware, phishing, and stronger authentication.

Another major topic is the usability of these technologies.  We hope that other companies and individuals working in these areas will register to attend IIW and help make it another great event.

A lot has happened since the last IIW in May and I’m excited about the progress that has been made in the intervening months.

Thinking back to past IIWs it’s great to see the progression of topics at IIW from geeky syntax and protocols to solutions and solving the problems from a user’s perspective. With the recent developments around “webfinger” and XRD, some of the “glue” pieces are coming together.

I believe the next core issue to tackle in “Making it all work” is the user experience. To date we’ve been solving the problems mostly from a functionality perspective. However, just being “functional” isn’t good enough for the average consumer. We need to make it easy and coherent (not a trivial task). By easy, I don’t just mean “there aren’t too many clicks” but rather a user experience that proactively helps the user with the tasks they need to perform. There are lots of nuances in the identity space and the average user doesn’t grok them, so the technology has to help the user make the “right” decision.

I’m expecting discussions like this to be a key part of IIW #9.

Soon afterward Brett McDowell the ED at Liberty Alliance approached me and Phil about having an Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) next to (the days following and in the same location) an upcoming Liberty Alliance meeting. We thought this was a great idea to create more space for people to meet about user-centric identity technologies and issues.  When Microsoft got wind of this, boy did I get an earful – they felt that the neutrality of IIW would be totally compromised if it came to be that closely associated with Liberty Alliance (remember Liberty Alliance was originally formed by Sun and others in response to Microsoft Passport).

IIW had provided a forum for anyone working on user-centric identity technologies to come together without anyone making an “agenda” for the meeting or creating a “technology road map.” Literally anyone who came could put a subject on the agenda on the day of the event. All parties did want to increase dialogue and cross-pollination among the groups, and we found a way through by jointly (IIW and Liberty Alliance) producing what we named the Identity Open Space (we also said we would be open to co-producing with others who asked – we did two with Digital Identity World). It was in Vancouver Canada and Kim Cameron along with several Microsoft folks along with many in the user-centric community attended and because it was the two days after a Liberty Alliance meeting many Liberty people were also there, and it was a good event that moved the industry forward.

Right in the middle of getting this worked out – I on a personal level had a very intense experience being caught in the middle – a giant trade association on one side and Microsoft on the other. We (me, Phil, Doc, Kim, Brett) managed to navigate this as a community and do the right thing and we became stronger as a community for having done so.

We continued to have IIW’s every 6 months and in 2006 it was clear we were going beyond just IIW and needed a community home/container to connect community efforts and provide common services (blogs, wikis, bank account for doing common work like holding events). We held a series of conversations and decided to create a community organization, drawing on an existing one, Identity Commons – the community liked the purpose and principles approach for bringing people together.  As a codition of brand transfer to a our nonprofit organization we worked on our version of purpose and principles. There were some delays in actually getting the organization legally formed and the brand transfered, but in 2007 we were an official organization: a network of organizations, initiatives, and projects all working on different aspects of a people-centric identity layer of the web. There are several places you can read about community history and background around Identity Commons. I wrote “What the heck is Identity Commons?”.

Next fall we are hosting our 9th event. Many things have move forward significantly in the community – OpenIDv2, OAuth, Venn of Identity paper, OSIS Interop, Concordia use-cases, Information Card evolution including Augmented Browsing with Action Cards, Portable Contacts, Open Social, OpenID/OAuth hybrid, Activity Streams, Distributed Social Networking, Discovery particularly XRD.  So what has made IIW work so well in fostering the kind of collaboration and innovation that has emerged from it?

• We have kept the space free: no one has the ability to buy time at the conference.
• All ideas are welcome: there is no committee controlling the agenda, so politics about what is “on the agenda” or “not” just doesn’t happen.
• It is a working workshop to solve real problems, move technical projects forward and discuss interoperability among them.
• We put attention towards creating the space for relationships between people to form naturally over time and thus enabled trust to grow.

Yes we know you have limited travel budget but Remember Plane tickets are cheaper then EVER – I just bought a one way ticket from SF to NY for $109 only 6 days in advance.

We have added the “VIP Ticket” for those of you who want to support IIW but can’t convince management to spend $1000 on a break sponsorship but can bill $998 to attend a a conference.  We hope to sell a few of these this week – we will thank you for being VIP’s.

Here is the list of proposed topics (think of it as the agenda and tell your boss the key things he needs to know you will be getting done there ) -

Here is the list of who is coming – yes amazing people in the industry.

PLEASE BLOG & TWEET ABOUT THE EVENT COMING UP AND WHY IT IS OF VALUE TO YOU. Let us know and we will link to you from here.

Our schedule is as follows -

We are looking forward to seeing everyone Monday May 18th. Our opening will begin at 9:30 AM on Monday with introductions to elements of the “open stack” OpenID, OAuth, XRD and more. Information Cards and also the Vendor Relationship Management Project. The focus will be on things developers can implement now or shortly.

We will have Pizza for lunch

The beginning of the “regular” conference with participant driven agenda creation is at 1pm on Monday.

At 1pm we will being with introductions and questions from those who are new to the space. We will create an agenda using the method we always have for IIW’s main conference (Open Space Technology) for the afternoon making sure there is space for questions from new folks get answered. Everyone is also welcome to post other regular IIW topics this afternoon – it is not limited to newbies.

The Monday Evening dinner at 7pm is sponsored by both the OpenID Foundation and Information Card Foundation and will be at the Tied House in Downtown Mountain View – Plaxo is sponsoring Drinks that evening.

Tuesday Morning we open with breakfast at 8AM and agenda making beginning at 8:30 AM we will close by 5:30.

Demonstrations of projects/products will happen in the last hour and a half of Tuesday.

Tuesday Dinner is at 7pm at Don Giovani’s an Italian place on Castro St. It is sponsored by Microsoft and Drinks are sponsored by Plaxo that evening too.

Wednesday we will open for breakfast at 8AM and do agenda making at 8:45 AM. We will close by 3 PM and the space will remain open until 5PM.

Let us know if you have any questions,

- Kaliya, Phil and Doc.

The OpenID Foundation and Information Card Foundation are pleased to jointly sponsor the Monday night dinner at the Spring 2009 Internet Identity Workshop (happening May 18-20) because this event is the where the core collaborative work of the user-centric identity community really happens. OpenID and Information Cards are both key pieces of this puzzle, and bringing our members together at the Internet Identity Workshop is a key way that each of our respective foundations can achieve our mission.

- Don Thibeau, Executive Director of the OpenID Foundation & Drummond Reed Executive Director of the Information Card Foundation

We are pleased to annouce that the OASIS IDTrust group headed by Dee Shur is once again sponsoring a break at IIW.

I really enjoyed talking with Nika the founder at the last workghop the company using the XRI standard to build a service to support simplified contact both in the digital realm and I think also with physical mail.  They are currently accepting people into their limted beta that you are welcome to sign up for.

Many thanks to Eran Hammer-Lahva for working with us on this sponsorship.

I didn’t realize it but we had a cap on the number of independents tickets – because of this I am leaving the lower independent rate up for another 48 hours to the end of day April 3 pacific time so those of you who went to register yesturday and found out that “tickets were sold out” can still get the low rate.   (Also those inspired to get involved at Web 2.0 Expo can sign up)

The Internet Identity Workshop , aka IIW, started as the Identity Gang way back in ‘05, and has since grown to become a fixture event in the calendars of many developers and other folks supportive of development work toward working user-driven identity systems. (These today include… (lists the long list of projects in the sidebar)

What’s cool about IIW is that we have a large bunch of individuals and outfits working in converging directions, creating and/or mashing up solutions to problems faced by individuals needing to control and assert their identity information in the digital world. For all the activity going on here, the whole field is still brand new, with lots of work left to be done before it’s ready for Prime Time, which has been going on in any case since the commercial Web was born 1.5 decades ago. More importantly, much effort is made by everybody involved not to foreclose progress or lock out other solutions where development vectors converge or cross. it’s the only thing like it I know.

What also rocks is that progress happens at every single IIW, sometimes a great deal of it. The whole thing is about doing. We have participants, not just attendees.

There is, however, urgency. Making sure we get our usual space at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View depends on getting enough registrants today.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.