interop

The OSIS interop was happened in a little room in the same hallway as the speaker lounge – but there was no signage to point people there 🙁
On Monday evening there was a OSIS steering committee meeting. The last one of these I sat in on was at Burton Group Catalyst. It was a good meeting – they talked about the European Identity Conference coming up in a few weeks where they will be again setting up and having interop demo’s based on the I3 work. Some of the European participants will be there. The agreement was that Interop4 would happen at Burton Group Catalyst continuing the work of I3 because it was not complete yet.
Roger Sullivan in his position as representing Liberty Alliance where he is President attended (he is also the Vice President of Business Development for Oracle Identity Management). I found it interesting that Roger said the word user when reffering to entities like Boeing and General Motors. I piped up and said that I felt that the use-cases and needs of ‘end-users’ were different then the needs of massive multi-national entities. He said that the ‘issues’ were all the same. I guess in one way that is true – in the end it is people at the end of the computer terminals. In another way it is different to log into an ‘enterprise environment’ (intense permissioning, lots of legal regulation etc) then it is to manage your personal shopping online. Out of this exchange came the differentiation between these two kinds of users – the larger being ‘deployers’ and the smaller being ‘users.’
As a community we had a good chance to talk about issues. The message that Roger did bring forward was that enterprise customers wanted less confusion in the market – because until it was clearer there would not be purchase of product. There will be more insight into this in the forth coming post about the the conversation I had with other executives at Oracle over a ‘blogger lunch’ on Thursday.
Major ISSUE – there was ‘apparently’ two competing interop events at the same conference. One was backed by a large and well funded organization with a PR staff to promote itself the other was a fabulous grassroots effort – doing huge amounts with very little. It was agreed that next time Concordia and OSIS would collaborate and have an interop in the same place and have one press release (or at least two press releases with mutual quoting) although with different use-case focuses. This is my drawing of the picture that became clear through the meeting.

OpenID Foundation and OSIS is a community group (there is serious consideration of changing our current description from “Working Groups” to “Community Groups”) of Identity Commons, the i-card foundation that is proposed would also be (there are some interesting questions about it).
I worked hard on Tuesday morning before the OSIS interop on some signage for Identity Commons. We had the new diagram that is on the front page of the wiki along with a this sentence that i think goes a long way to describe who we are.

We are a community of groups working on addressing the social, legal and technical issues that arise with the emerging, identity, data and social layer of the internet.

Johannes pointed out that after that some articulation of the issues we are tackling could be listed. This is a list I recently wrote up and shared with a reporter (and she actually said it was ‘clear’). I will put the high level questions we are trying to answer in the context of the ‘clear’ articulation I sent her.
Since the Web was built around “pages”, no tools or standards were created to control how the information about you was collected or used. We all agree that we need some kind of “open identity layer” for the Internet, but we don’t know exactly what that means or what it looks like. Our community has come together around some shared understanding of this and we continue to ’struggle’ with what it means and how it should work.
We are working as a Community, on the development of the next layer of the web—for people and their information—the social-data layer. It’s going to take time to figure out, and lots of people have already been working hard for several years and have made significant progress.
These are the questions we’re striving to answer:

• What are the open standards to make it work? (identity and semantic)
• What are technical implementations of those standards?How do different standards and technical implementations interoperate?
• What are the new social norms and legal constructs needed to make it work?
• What are the businesses cases / models that drive all this?

Identity Commons is the collection of groups where these conversations are happening.
All this takes time, and yes, interest is growing and movement is happening, but there is not ‘one answer’ or ‘one blueprint.’ As Doc Searls, one of the ‘grandfathers’ of this movement is fond of saying, it is a “market conversation.”
We need a broad and diverse range of participants. This layer once implemented will be as world changing as the World Wide Web of documents was for the Internet.
I also think it is important to remember and emphasize that we are in a phase where there is a lot to get figured out and there is not ‘one answer.’ I think we as a community can tell a clear compelling story to the market AND continue to foster a lively and diverse conversation about the issues that are arising (technical, legal, social). It is some times is hard to remember how unclear things were 2 years ago but they were very vague then – if we continue to progress I am confident a market can develop for these tools. Both the peer-to-peer sessions on this topic were interesting and had a range of enterprise folks looking at these tools (a blog post about those will also follow in this series).
Here is a photo of the interop in progress – next post – interop videos – coming tomorrow.

Over the next week I will work on the the 20 other posts that I have outlined this morning. – ok off to the airport now.

Day One seems so long ago. I moved all my stuff over from the east bay on Sunday night – Pam was nice enough to let me room with her to save the 1 hour commute each way to home for the week.
I got up early and headed to the Concordia Interop – I got their early enough to see the OpenID logo on the sign. OpenID has not been actively participating in these Liberty lead efforts for a while now and asked that their logo be removed from the website etc. Shortly afterwards a guy with white tape came and covered it up.

This slide explained their current focus and next focus.

Eve handed the podium over to Mike Jones and he introduced the day and explained the three scenario’s they were demonstrating interoperability for. SAML and WS stuff with an emphasis on the enterprise use case.


They shifted into demo’s at the back of the room and presentations at the front.
Lena from FuGen presented this slide.

It presented the complexity of federation and the different shapes that it has. The same policy between a range of partners, different policies with different partners and
There was about 300 people in the introduction and this faded out.

The Interop Event last week at Burton Group Catalyst was a huge milestone. The event lived up to its name…

cat·a·lyst [kat-l-ist] -noun
A person or thing that precipitates an event or change.

The energy in the room was really high. Everyone was excited. People said there was interest from enterprises (the attendees at the conference who were not vendors) in the technology and how they could help them with identity management.
It was so inspiring after all these years to actually see the vision manifest so concretely. I was at my first ‘identity meeting’ in June of 2003 when Planetwork hosted an ‘extra day’ with Identity Commons (1). It was described this way by an attendee:

I attended the “extra” day of the conference today. I was in a session that could have been called: all digital identity, all day and all of the night.

So four years later it was really amazing. As Dick highlighted we are finally up to “the chasm“.
As I was there looking at the sign on the wall in the photo and feeling the energy and all the work I really wished that Owen Davis and Andrew Nelson were there to witness it all. Hopefully they can come to the Internet Identity Workshop this December (3-5). The social issues that this new technology raises was one of the main reasons they founded Identity Commons in 2001. These topics are just starting to become really important to deal with and working groups are beginning to emerge. The fact that Cryptographic trust does not equate to Social Trust was highlighted by Neuenschwander in his talk on the final day. (in googling cryptographic trust I came across Chris Allen’s essay on Progressive Trust). We still have lots to ‘talk about’ to get it all figured out (more shared language and understanding to be built – see the last three paragraphs of this post).