Google on why they come to IIW

We ask each of our sponsors to share why they support IIW and what they hope to get out of it.

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.

“Making it all Work” – core issue this IIW

George Fletcher wrote a great post today reflecting on past IIW’s and looking ahead to this coming IIW.

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.

IIW & Identity Community Bumps in the Road

When we first started meeting (the early “seedling” meetings of community) at other people’s conferences, there were Microsoft people, Liberty Alliance/SAML people,  Shibboleth implementers,  user-centric folks (OpenID, LID, sxip, i-names/xri), big idea folks (Doc Searls), etc. We met for a couple of hours at a time and knew there was common ground, but knew we needed more time to really understand each other: to have more of a shared language and develop enough strength in the relationships in the community to work together. We figured we needed to have more time to meet together, so we convened the Internet Identity Workshop. That first event was amazing and quite formative – kicking off the conversation that would lead to OpenIDv2 via Yadis. Kim Cameron presented his 7 laws of identity that have become foundational to community thinking and introduced the idea of information cards and selectors; much work is now happening around this.

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.

IIW May 18-20 Regular Reg. Extended til May 11th

Phil and I have decided to extend regular registration that is $200 for independents and $350 for everyone else until next Monday before prices go up $100. PLEASE REGISTER this week so we will be able to buy food for you.   We have a fabulous line up of sponsors for the conference - THANK YOU.

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

OASIS IDTrust is a sponsor

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

OUNO is on board as sponsor

OUNO is a great little company in the identity community that is sponsoring IIW for the second workshop in a row. This year they are supporting the notes taking in the documentation center for a day.

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.

Yahoo! sponsors IIW

We are pleased that Yahoo! Developer Network is on board as a sponsor of a break at IIW.

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

Over 80 people signed up for IIW

I am really pleased to announce that we have had success with our early registration drive.  We had a goal of 75 sign ups by April One and we have over 80 people registered.

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)

Doc on IIW + Early Bird Registraion ends today

Doc Searls one of the co-producers of IIW posted this yesturday on his blog:

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.

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.

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