My friend Allen who was at Brookings got a job with NTIA to figure out what issues to focus on and how to get multi-stakeholder collaboration on cyber security issues. Because he asked me to respond I took the time to give him my thoughts and input drawing on my experience with the attempts by NSTIC to do this same thing. Here is the PDF document. IPTF-Kaliya-2
I will in time work to publish it in blog sized sections online so it is more internally linkable (starting with an index from this post). Until then enjoy.
Facilitation Topics
Online Community Unconfernece "Its BACK!"
I am really excited to be working with a super awesome crew of leaders of the Online Community Manager Tribe – or OCTribe. We have been considering reviving the event and the pieces have finally come together to do it.
May 21st at the Computer History Museum
Registration is Open!
I really love the other co-organizers who are all rockstar community managers.
- Bill Johnston, Red Plastic Monkey
- Susan Tenby, Blog
- Gail Williams, Blog
- Scott Moore, Phoom
- Marina Ogneva, Twitter, Facebook
- Rachel Luxemburg, Fait Lux
The conference was originally produced by Forum One and I contracted with them to help design and facilitate. That event itself grew out of an invitational summit they hosted annually on online communities. I actually attended one of these in 2004 as a replacement for Owen Davis who I worked for at the time at Identity Commons (1).
My firm Unconference.net is doing the production and facilitation for the event.
I plan to bring forward topics of digital identity forward at the event and hopefully get some of the amazing expertise on identity and reputation to participate in NSTIC.
Info Sharing Agreements! Support it! Make it Real!
Joe Andrieu and the Information Sharing Working Group has put a lot of work and effort into creating a Standard set of Information Sharing Agreements represented by a standard label. They want to invest in user -research to make it really work.
I am putting in $100 and I encourage all of you to do the same. They need to raise $12000 in the next 8 days.
See the Kickstarter Campaign here.
Recent Travels Pt1: IIW
IIW is always a whirlwind and this one was no exception. The good thing was that even with it being the biggest one yet it was the most organized with the most team members. Phil and I were the executive producers. Doc played is leadership role. Heidi did an amazing job with production coordinating the catering, working with the museum and Kas did a fabulous job leading the notes collection effort and Emma who works of site got things up on the wiki in good order.
We had a session that highlighted all the different standards bodies standards and we are now working on getting the list annotated and plan to maintain it on the Identity Commons wiki that Jamie Clark so aptly called “the switzerland” of identity.
We have a Satellite event for sure in DC January 17th – Registration is Live.
We are working on pulling one together in Toronto Canada in
early February, and Australia in Late March.
ID Collaboration Day is February 27th in SF (we are still Venue hunting).
I am learning that some wonder why I have such strong opinions about standards…the reason being they define the landscape of possibility for any given protocol. When we talk about standards for identity we end up defining how people can express themselves in digital networks and getting it right and making the range of possibility very broad is kinda important. If you are interested in reading more about this I recommend Protocol: and The Exploit. This quote from Bruce Sterling relative to emerging AR [Augmented Reality] Standards.
If Code is Law then Standards are like the Senate.
Alignment of Stakeholders around the many NSTIC Goals
The Many Goals for the Identity Ecosystem & NSTIC Governance
The NSTIC governance NOI articulates many key activities, qualities and goals for a governance system for NSTIC. NSTIC must:
- convene a wide variety of stakeholders to facilitate consensus
- administer the process for policy and standards
- development for the Identity Ecosystem Framework in accordance with the Strategy’s Guiding Principles
- maintain the rules of participating in the Identity Ecosystem
- be private sector-led
- be persistent and sustainable
- foster the evolution of the Identity Ecosystem to match the evolution of cyberspace itself.
Achieving these goals will require high-performance collaboration amongst the steering group and all self-identified stakeholder groups. It will also require earning the legitimacy from the public at large and using methods that surface their experience of the Identity Ecosystem Framework as it evolves.
[Read more…] about Alignment of Stakeholders around the many NSTIC Goals
Proactive Development of Shared Language by NSTIC Stakeholders
This is the “punchline section” (in my response it is after what is below…the history of collaboration in the identity community):
Proactive Development of Shared Language by NSTIC Stakeholders
In 2004-5 the Identity Gang (user-centric identity community) was 1/10 the size of the current NSTIC stakeholder community. It took us a year of active grassroots effort to develop enough common language and shared understanding to collaborate. NSTIC doesn’t have 5-10 years to coalesce a community that can collaborate to build the Identity Ecosystem Framework. To succeed, the National Program Office must use processes to bring value and insight while also developing shared language and understanding amongst stakeholders participating.
[Read more…] about Proactive Development of Shared Language by NSTIC Stakeholders
Ecosystems Collaborate using Shared Language – NSTIC
Collaboration is a huge theme in NSTIC. Below is the initial approach to collaboration in the document:
The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace charts a course for the public and private sectors to collaborate to raise the level of trust associated with the identities of individuals, organizations, networks, services, and devices involved in online transactions.
Collaboration, as defined by Eugene Kim, a collaboration expert and the first Chief Steward of Identity Commons, occurs when groups of two or more people interact and exchange knowledge in pursuit of a shared, collective, bounded goal
To achieve the challenging goals set out in NSTIC, such as raising trust levels around identities, high performance collaboration is required. Both shared language and shared understanding are prerequisites for high-performance collaboration.
This is a powerful excerpt from Eugene Kim’s blog about two experiences from technical community participants (including Drummond Reed from the user-centric identity community) that paints a clear picture of the importance of time for, and the proactive cultivation of, shared language:
[Read more…] about Ecosystems Collaborate using Shared Language – NSTIC
The Emerging Personal Data Ecosystem
This week I am heading to Telco 2.0 because the conversations with telco’s about how they participate in the Personal Data Ecosystem are moving forward in interesting ways. IIW #10 had several long sessions about the topic. IIW-East was full with each of the 8 time slots having a session about different aspects and IIW-Europe October 11th coincided with the announcement of the first community prototype personal data stores by MyDex.
Learning from one of the mistakes of the past – market confusion inhibiting understanding and adoption of user centric identity technologies. The Personal Data Ecosystem is going to be a “front door” for those seeking to understand the ecosystem overall with a simple message and clear picture of what is happening. It will also connect people to the community working on the aspect of the ecosystem relevant to them. Our focus is on developing the core communities needed for success and fostring communication amongst them. These communities include end users, large personal data service providers, companies providing data to personal data services, developers and startups leveraging this new ecosystem, regulators and advocacy groups along with the legal community and their efforts to create the legal frameworks needed to really protect people.
We arleady have a number of projects working on key aspects around the ecosystem and we will support their success linking them together – Project VRM, ID-Legal, Project Nori, Higgins-Project, Project Danube, XDI.org and IIW (they are linked at the bottom of the Personal Data Ecosystem site), This is a big tent ANY OTHER projects that are related are welcome. We don’t need another dot org to link efforts togethers so PDE is going to be chartered as part of IC3 (Identity Commons).
Right now the Personal Data Ecosystem site is aggregating content from blogs of those covering and building in the space. This week we will be doing our first Podcast covering this emerging industry – Aldo Casteneda who you may remember from The Story of Digital Identity will be hosting it with me.
Next week we will be able to collect links submitted via delicious for the blog. I am working with the fabulous Sarah Dopp on website strategy and online community development and Van Riper is working with me on community management.
IIW coming up in a week is going to be a core community gathering for emerging developments.
We are not at War
I was the first person Van asked to speak at the Community Leadership Summit West Ignite talks. I was the last person to submit my slides. I have a lot to say about community but I had a hard time figuring out exactly what to say. I knew I wanted to talk about the identity community and our success in working together. Robert Scoble’s quote really got me going and I decided to use the talk to respond to the comment that was catalyzed by his facebook post/tweet “Who is going to win the Identity War of 2010”
This is completely the wrong frame to foster community collaboration.
Identity for Online Community Managers
I was asked by Bill Johnson of Forum One Networks to kick off the discussion on the next Online Community Research Network call this week with the topic Identity for Online Community Managers – drawing on the presentation that I put together for the Community 2.0 Summit. I cover the basics of how OpenID, OAuth and Information Cards work, who is “in” terms of supporting the projects and what community managers/platforms can do. We will discuss the implications of these new identity and data sharing protocols on the call.
Making ID/Social Web Products Better
This Friday I am going to be co-facilitating a day of learning and exchange about Innovation, Design and Serious Games Exchange this Friday in San Francisco. I would like to invite you all to participate. It will be an open space style unconfernece – with attendees creating the agenda – it is open to all.
Last September I took a training with the founder of Innovation Games Luke Hohmman (to be a game facilitator) and it was amazing set of fun “games” to play with the users/customers of one’s products. Quite different then a focus group in terms of the kind of information that you get about how to shape/design your products. (wikipedia article – details all 12 games and information about selecting the appropriate game)
I know what you are asking how is playing games going to help with my products, workplace or process. I wondered this too….her is a simple example.
I explained one of them (Buy a Feature) this way at the Online Community Unconference – say you have a next generation set of features to build for your product – you have 10 potential features but only time to build a few of them – how do you prioritize/decide about which ones to put in the next release?
Buy a Feature is a game you can play o do this (and it is both online and face to face)
You bring in 10 current customers together and give them each $200 of play money. You give each of your features a cost totaling $3000-$4000 (one might be $100 (really easy to build) $500 (harder/more time) etc.) They must amongst them selves figure out how to spend their $2000 to by a limited set of the 10 features. You could play this with several sets of customers and then gather information about what they want. It helps you make decisions about what to build AND it is fun for them to play the game of “buying” the features they want.
The conference is not limited to “just” innovation games but also includes other design and “serious” games.
- Design games: Offering collaborative design activities within a game format improves idea generation and communication among stakeholders. By shifting focus to the game, power relations and other factors that might hamper idea generation, are downplayed
- Serious games: Ranging from theater improvisation to interactive games technology within non-entertainment sectors, serious games have uses in education, government, health, military, science, corporate training, first responders, and social change
You don’t have to be an expert to attend – if you are just exploring these things we invite you along.
There have been a few companies in the identity space that have used these tools – I just can’t say who.
I am also happy to talk with folks if they are interested in using games to innovate and do better product design in the identity and social web space.
Here is the book if you are interested in learning more.
“Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play” (Luke Hohmann)
Speaking this Spring
I have actually put a bunch of work in to moving all the content that was on the sidebar of my blog up into pages that you can see along the top navigation. They still need some more work but it is good to finally have them there. One of the pages is about upcoming talks.
SXSW Interactive,March 13-17, Austin TX.
I am facilitating a panel about OpenID, Oauth and the Enterprise. It includes Joseph Smarr, Bob Blakley and Danny Kolke the CEO of Etelos.
This is the description. I hope we broaden it to include other identity technologies too.
The debate over identity, data and authentication is gaining ground in the social networking world. The more difficult discussion regarding enterprises and Web 2.0 has yet to start. Businesses realize that they must protect the data of their company, employees and customers. Join brave leaders from several Web Application companies that are beginning the discussion – Are OpenID and OAuth good for the enterprise?
I will be facilitating a Peer 2 Peer session at the RSA security conference April 23, 10:40-11:30 on the topic Claims-Based Identity – What is the Business Case?
The user-centric identity community has been working on information cards an open standard for claims based identity architecture (as opposed to a network end-point architecture). The big question that arises is “what is the business case?” This session will be an open discussion around the existing and potential business models and cases for such a meta-system to emerge.
I am speaking at Community 2.0, on Identity Across Communities – Tools for Making it Real. May 13, 2009 San Francisco, CA
This presentation will cover the core user-centric identity technologies that are emerging to support people being able to port their identifiers and information about themselves between websites. The goal is to make it easier for people to share information along with support the emergent social effects like trust that come from persistence across time and space and ultimately build stronger communities faster. The tools include OpenID, Open Social, Information Cards, The Relationship Button from Project VRM (Vendor Relationship Management).
Online Community Unconference East
I am heading out east in February and will do several identity related events – more on those by the end of the week.
I will be once again facilitating Forum One Networok‘s Online Community Unconference East February 11. Bill Johnston has been great to work with on this event and has extended early bird for $145 registration until the Jan 22nd.
The Online Community Unconference East is a gathering of online
community professionals – managers, developers, business people, tool providers, investors – to discuss experience and strategies in the development and growth of online communities. Those involved in online community development (and social software in general) share many common challenges: community management, tools, marketing, business models, legal issues. As we have found with our past events, the best source of information on all of these challenges is other knowledgeable practitioners.
At all the online community unconferences I have offered a session about identity technologies. I am hoping that some community members working on OpenID and Information Card maybe even some ID-WSF and SAML folks too. will also join me at the event. It is a great opportunity to talk with actual adopters/potential adopters of these technologies they represent hundreds of thousands of users and because of the focus on online community managers – there is an emphasis on the human side of things not just “business models” or “technical how to”
What the Heck is Identity Commons?
The purpose of Identity Commons is:
The purpose of Identity Commons is to support, facilitate, and promote the creation of an open identity layer for the Internet — one that maximizes control, convenience, and privacy for the individual while encouraging the development of healthy, interoperable communities.
This one sentence jams a lot into it – we tried to do that so the purpose didn’t go on and on – but was clear, broad and inclusive of the range of issues that need to be addressed and balanced. Jamming so much into that one sentence also creates a challenge – it has to be ‘parsed’ quite a bit to get what it all means. I worked with Chris Allen recently to separate out the values within the purpose and our community. This is our initial draft that is still evolving (wordsimthing suggestions are welcome).
We believe in the dignity of human individual in the context of the digital world.
In order to make this true we strive for a balance of factors and valuesas digital systems and tools evolve:
- Individual control, convenience & privacy
- Sharing of information when participating in community
- Support for commercial and non-commercial exchange
- Interoperability and openness between systems
We work to bring these values into practice by fostering a collaborative a community of individuals, organizations and companies share these values and are working together towards practical technical implementations.
We share a pragmatic idealism.
We work to practice what we preach and have openness and transparency in what we do.
We do know there are a lot of technical social and legal issues that arise and Identity Commons is a space that make it possible to in a non-directive non-hierachical way address them in a collaborative way.
We also have some shared principles mostly concerning how we organize ourselves and work together. Each has a sentence to articulate it further.
1. Self-organization
2. Transparency
3. Inclusion
4. Empowerment
5. Collaboration
6. Openness
7. Dogfooding
What the heck is an “open identity layer” – well we don’t exactly know but we do have a community that has come together some shared understanding and continue to ‘struggle’ with what it means and how it should work. Identity Commons provides a ‘common’ space to work on this shared goal by facilitating dialogue and collaboration.
Kim Cameron introduced the terminology “identity meta-system” and articulated what that might mean. The Laws of Identity were put forward by him along with some additional ideas by other community members.
There is no “decider” or group of deciders or “oversight committee” as part of Identity Commons ‘directing’ the development of the “open identity layer”.
We are a community collaborating together and working to exchange information about our independent but related efforts working towards the vision. The way we do this is via the working group agreement.
- Asking each working group to articulate its purpose, principles and practices by filling out a charter – this helps us be clear about how different groups work and what they do/are planning on doing
- Stewards review proposed working group charters – ask questions, consider were there are synergies, and see if they are aligned with the purpose and principles
- A vote of the stewards council is held
- Working Groups agree to report quarterly on their activities to remain active as groups of the organization – this also is our core ‘inter group communication mechanism – so that you don’t have to be on 20+ mailing lists to know what is going on in the community.
More about Stewards:
Each working group has one steward and an alternate for the stewards council.
The stewards are responsible for the things IC holds in common – the brand and its integrity and common assets (like the wiki and bank account). It does not ‘direct things’.
Stewards have (an optional) monthly phone calls and discuss and make decisions on a mailing list (that anyone can join).
More about Working Groups:
There are working groups within Identity Commons that support the community collaborating – the stewards council does not ‘run’ these groups but they serve the community and our efforts together- The Internet Identity Workshop, IC Collaborative Tools, Idnetity Futures, Id Media Review, Identity Gang, Marketing and Evangelism.
Working Groups come in several forms:
They can be an group of people with a passion to address something they feel needs to be addressed to get to the big vision. They want some wiki space and a mailing list to talk about the issues. Examples include Enterprise Positioning, Inclusive Initiatives, Identity Rights Agreements.
They can be an existing project that are part of a larger organization, Higgins is an example of this – they are a project of the Eclipse Foundation.
They can be something that grew out of conversations in the Identity Commons community and found a home within another organization like Project VRM (charter) has as part of the Berkman Center and will likely become its own ‘organization’ independent of Berkman by the end of the year.
They can be completely independent nonprofit organizations with their own boards, governance, bank account etc. examples include XDI.org and OpenID.
Some just get technical stuff done as part of IC like OSIS (doing its 3rd Interop at RSA in a month), and Identity Schemas.
Benefits to being explicitly a part of the IC Community.
clarity about each groups purpose, principles, and practices – so that collaboration is easier.
sharing of information via the collaborative tools and lists, along with the required quarterly reporting,
We “don’t know” what an identity layer looks like but we do know it needs to have certain properties to make it work for people the extensible nature of IC gives people the freedom to start a new group that addresses an aspect of the vision. This is the page on the IC wiki that explains our organizational structure.
We are a community.
We are a community more then “an organization” and joining does not mean subsuming a group identity under IC but rather stating a commitment to a shared vision, common values and commitment to collaboration.
A touch of formalism can help create great clarity of group pratices (governenace), leadership, intention, and focus. Not needed for small groups of 12 people doing one thing- helpful when you scale to the 1000’s of people working on the big vision. IC through its groups structure has 1000’s of people participating helping to innovate the technology and think about the social and legal implications.
We are not about “a solution” or “a blue print” there will be multiple operators and multiple standards – yes like the web there may one day be ‘standard’ that emerges just like TCP/IP did and HTML/HTTPS – however it is way to early to promote or be behind “one” thing, it is not to early to start collaborating and building shared meaning and understanding and interoperability between emerging efforts.
Identity problems in the digital realm are as much about technical issues as they are about the social implications and legal issues. Identity Commons explicitly makes space for the social and legal issues to be deal with in relationship to the technologies as it evolves.
In closing there is a background (shorter) and a history (longer) written about the community as it evolved.
Data Sharing Summit 2 – questions to figure out
So I am working hard to pull the details together for the 2nd Data Sharing Summit. This is not an easy task given it is a risk to make commitments to venues and vendors – to make it possible to host the event.
This is an option that would give more time to organize and dove tail nicely with related work in the identity community
OPTION 4 – have it begin Wednesday and continue Thursday May 14-15 immediately following the Internet Identity Workshop
There is also the possibility of having something near Web 2.0 Expo the weekend before seems to make more sense to people are not completely wiped out from a weekend of partying and conferencing.
One of the reasons for this is that I know people come from out of town to attend Web 2.0 expo and some for several weeks so that there will be people in town who would not otherwise come ‘just for this event’.
We currently have 2 venue/time/space options
1) in Downtown SF but only can have at maximum 120 people and only 3 breakout rooms beyond the main space – this would be for Friday and Saturday the 18th and 19th. We would be restricted tot use from 8-5 pm.
2) in Mountainview at the Computer History Museum – a beautiful space that we would have to pay for but could hold up to 500 people and would only be for Saturday the 19th. It could go from 8 am to 8 pm+ even. We could feed folks breakfast lunch and dinner along with a barista.
Either way we will be charging money for the event about $100 – and working on raising sponsorship money. I believe events should be funded both by the people who do attend AND by sponsors. This helps create balance and by paying money to come people make a commitment to ‘be there’ for the event and the organize can plan for their attendance.
I am trying to get a read on what will work best.
I am still asking Lucy to put in OpenID for commenting on my blog and she still can’t get it to work even in dialoguing with Pam about it. So if you want to chime in you need to email me kaliya (at) mac (dot) com.
The third option people have put forward it so have it on an ‘large’ tech companies campus and I have said that doesn’t work cause the topic is neutral – so this is not an option in my mind.
DIDW Panel on Internet Scale Identity
Here are the slides for the talk. Will write more about this panel after it happens.
Thoughts on Community Engagement
A few days ago David sent me a link to his post responding to Stefan’s (very long) slam of OpenID. He did a great job articulating how many of those who have been critical of flaws in OpenID have been actively engaged with the community in finding solutions to the problems.
From Gnomedex one of the things I came away with was a deepened appreciation of the community that we have in technology generally and identity in particular. There are a lot of smart, good people working together despite our different personal world views, personal quirks technology backgrounds and visions for the future of the technology.
There are a lot of different perspectives in the social networking datasharing space. Marc Canter called the Data Sharing Summit to figure it out – face-to-face. (I raised my hand and said I would help facilitate). It is going to be Sept 7-8 in Richmond CA (Bay Area). Face-to-Face for a day can be like 6 months on a mailing list. It is invaluable and the text dialogue afterwards is improved in quality and effectiveness.
Ok back to Stefan:
Personally, I can’t be bothered much with a sign-on system for blog comments and social networks, but if it makes other people happy, great.
In fact social uses of persistent identity are actually interesting and just dismissing it as pithy isn’t really productive.
OpenID is a starter way to for websites to start using identity tools for people. Thousands of websites have adopted it – cause it is easy to do and it works. You could get up and praise OpenID for existing cause it is warming all those Relying Party sites to the idea there are identity tools and services they can offer to their user-bases. The challenge that Stefan and everyone else has with more complex visions of how things could/should work is how do you make it ‘easy’ – both for users and developers.
I think nuances that Stefan articulates are really important.
“selective disclosure, authenticated anonymity and pseudonymity (possibly with revocation capabilities), improve availability, enable privilege and entitlement management, and provide security against insider attacks originating from the Identity Provider,”
These need answers and they are not going to come from one company with one solution alone. Community engagement is needed – so I encourage all to put your solutions into the mix and lets see if we can figure this out.
It would be very worrisome to me, however, if a URL-based system (whether OpenID or a variant) would become the basis for “serious” identity and access management applications such as e-commerce, e-health, e-government, general credential systems, and so forth.
Your challenge is that people (consumers, business people, legislators) can readily comprehend identifier system that work like this. If you and others don’t want the world to work like this then it is up to you to figure out how you explain complex math in a way that doesn’t go into the detail but just explains it in a way that ‘makes sense.’ I have had the luxury of sitting down a few times and listening to you explain ‘how the math works’ and it still seems a bit ‘mind boggling’ but “I trust you” – basically it is where peoples trust lies…is it in ‘human’ trust (my openID provider isn’t going to take my password and log into places for me) or is it in ‘math trust’ (these really smart guys have these groovy algorithms that mean only “I” can access my stuff and I can share information with them without really telling them who I am). I hope the latter can work – that the systems can evolve and people will “get” them. However it is a communication challenge and an adoption challenge that is not easy.
I have encouraged Stefan to come to community events many times. . I do hope he takes up my invitation to come to the Internet Identity Workshop December 3-5. I hope you will all encourage him too.
Supernova Open Space June 19th – come talk about Identity
I am working with Supernova to facilitate their Open Space day on June 19th at Warton West this is going to be great. It is basically free with a price of $25 (this is so that people who say they are coming actually do).
The Supernova Open Space Workshop is an open forum on the social, moral, technical, and strategic questions impacting the increasingly connected world in which we live. Discussions about topics like user control, neutrality, identity and open standards are setting the stage for future policies and economic decisions. Come to this event to learn more, participate in the community and shape the future of the New Network.
Doc is going to be actively involved and hosting active conversations around Vendor Relationship Management. I hope we can also dive into other aspects of identity and the next web.
Museums and the Web presentation
I was asked by Jennifer Trant to come speak on the closing plenary for Museums and the Web. Here is the talk I am giving.
I didn’t go to a whole lot of the conference but what I did see on Thursday covered three talks on Tagging and the issues that managing digital content in relationship to museum collections raises.
Tagging and Searching – serendipity and museum collection databases by Sebastian Chan, Australia.
When is a terracotta hut urn like a sailor’s deck-log?: Meaning instantiated across virtual boundaries. Richard Smiraglia, USA
Personalized Museum Experience: The Rijksmuseum Use Case
Lora Aroyo, Rogier Brussee, Peter Gorgels, Lloyd Rutledge, Natalia Stash, Yiwen Wang, The Netherlands.
The Answer
The Question:
The one question I have about this collaboration announcement why Cordance, NetMesh LiveJournal or of SixAppart were not listed in the announcement.
The Answer:
Every PR department from every company has to get involved. Each has a constituency and message that it wants to be clear. Every time a change is made it has to go everyone else for approval, often provoking a further change, and so it just takes time.
Kim I hear you about this and it is a legitimate explanation if you are dealing with ‘big companies.’ Last time I checked you only had to call two people to check in with NetMesh and Cordance as neither has PR departments. My guess is they would have noded yes to the announcement and would have been very happy to participate without more attention overhead. I think when you are dealing with as tightly knit a community of little companies who are collaborating deeply (perhaps how tightly knit was not obvious to you) it is good to be inclusive. It also seems a bit unfair to highlight those two over the others given the magnitude of this PR (500k people had watched the keynote via the web). Even though you say this “Nor was this meant to be PR as such” the truth is that for companies of the size they are it is a BIG deal in PR terms to be on announcement like the one you released yesterday.
Hopefully things will be smoother in the future with the formation of the Foundation for OpenID more official it will be easy to figure out who to talk to about these sort of ‘announcements.’
No answer to my question yet.
The one question I have about this collaboration announcement why Cordance, NetMeshand other companies who have made major contributions and have critical stakes in the OpenID community were not listed in the announcement. I know it was pulled together very quickly but I think the contributions of those two companies have been extensive and deserved mention (and yes! they do have ‘code’).
There was no mention LiveJournal or of SixAppart or Brad Fitzpatrick the originator of OpenID.
I hope that in the future we can work to be more inclusive and uplift all the main contributors to these efforts.