Executive Directors Summary

Now that we’ve had time to observe the reactions and resulting coverage from the Open Identity for Open Government Initiative, I want to discuss what we’ve gained and where we are headed.  Overall, the announcement, the foundations’ presence in Washington – at both The White House and the Gov 2.0 Summit, and the media outreach, was a big boost to OpenID adoption and the open identity community. For so long, the media and online influencers have taken a “looks promising but wait and see” approach to open identity technology. This announcement advanced the discussion.

The government’s effort underway is a pilot; a very deliberate beta test of OpenID technology with new integration and interoperability tasks etc. We don’t know when we will finish but we do know we will make mistakes and wrestle with usability and security issues.

We are at the beginning of a shakedown cruise on two tracks -the open source identity technologies and the open trust frameworks.  Both are parts of the GSA ICAM schema and both on the agenda of