Text and PDF downloadable copies of this report are attached at the bottom of this page.

Introduction:
Identity Commons (IC)is a loosely connected community of Working Groups that are addressing the social, legal and technical issues that arise with the emerging identity layer of the internet. 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.

A wide range of individuals from both large and small companies have been dialoguing and developing tools to make this vision a reality. This past year the community was formalized, forming a nonprofit corporation. Identity Commons has adopted a set of principals to ensure an open, inclusive, and bottoms-up operating structure. Each Working Group has a representative on the Stewards Council. Membership resides in the Working Groups - where the real work is happening. Each quarter Working Groups report on their activities. This was our first quarter of official operation with reporting Q4 2007. There is also news from groups in the process of joining Identity Commons included.

Contents:

Current Working Groups

Community & Events
Identity Gang
Internet Identity Workshop

Technology
OSIS (Open Source Identity System)
OpenID
Identity Schemas

Social Agreements and Policy
Identity Rights Agreements
XRI Org

ID Commons Operations

IC Collaborative Tools

In Process to Join Identity Commons:

Business Application

VRV (Vendor Relationship Management)

Open Source Code Projects for Identity Systems and Data Sharing

• Higgins Project
• Bandit Project
• Pamela Project

Groups related to Standards

• SAML Commons
• XDI Commons

Newly Formed

• Enterprise Positioning
• Enterprise Identity Architects
• Newbies 4 Newbies
• Inclusive Initiatives
• Id Futures
• Id Media Review

You can find more background information about IC here and a more in depth history here

IIW Home
IIW Charter at IC
This report on the wiki

Successes
Phil Windley, Kaliya Hamlin and Doc Searls produce the Internet Identity Workshop twice a year. One way to track the vector of developments in user-centric identity is to record the milestones of the workshop each year. This is Phil Windley's characterization of the developments (based on some earlier comments from Johannes Ernst):

#1 Oct 2005: initial meeting and introductions to projects being worked on.

#2 May 2006: proponents of multiple identity protocols start dialog about how they can work together

#3 Dec 2006: small-scale interoperability and some consolidation

#4 May 2007: interoperability demonstrations of Information Cards and lightweight solutions converge on OpenID.

At the 5th IIW in Dec 2007 OpenID, CardSpace, and SAML, along with supporting technologies, projects, and consortia are accepted. The questions have become what to do now that these foundational technologies have been worked out.

This was December 3-5 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

This event was a real mile stone for the community - some described it as reaching the "end of the beginning" for the community. OpenID 2.0 had its IPR issues settled and the spec declared final. The first real in-depth meeting of the minds of that group had happened at the first IIW in Oct 2005 in Berkeley. Other developments included continuing discussions between OAuth and OpenID about how their two open standards complemented one another and the Higgins project moved closer to a 1.0 release.

At the beginning of the 2007 workshop we engaged in a community conversation about "what we know and what we don't know" out of that came different statements that were available for 'voting' using Dotmocracy. The conference was so good that almost no one had time to read through the ideas posted, but they are captured on a wiki.

At the close of this IIW we had community awards handed out - a range of people were recognized for their efforts in the community both at the event and over the past year. To see who awarded who for what check out this page.

We also gave the first Owen Davis Award to Andrew Nelson and Owen Davis for exemplary dedication to the “good of the community”. They were the founders of the first Identity Commons in 2001.

Notes Pages: Tuesday Wednesday

Blog coverage was not as much for this event as there has been in the past. It is never too late to post reflections - here are some.

There was a video recap produced by Been Verified

Thank You to our sponsors to date:
AOL, Novell, Microsoft, British Telecom, Liberty Alliance Project, Google, Verisign, Plaxo, Adobe, Cisco, OASIS IDtrust, CommerceNet, SXIP, Higgins Project, Bandit Project, Vidoop, Applied Identity, Authentrus, Planetwork, ClaimID

Breakdowns
The Monday evening dinner venue was too small and the music was too loud at the Tuesday evening venue. These problems will be remedied for future workshops.

Requests

• Please add more notes/reflections on the wiki if you have some about a session you were at. Please blog about IIW 2007b and add to the blog coverage.
• We need to know dates to avoid when booking our Fall workshop. PLEASE let us know ASAP if there are events planned we should not conflict with.
• We would like your help inviting others to participate. Please don't be shy to invite those who may have an interest in Identity Commons.

Announcements

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Identity Gang Home
Identity Gang Charter at IC
Identity Gang Charter at IC

The Identity Gang was founded in 2004 as a mailing list and small gatherings that happened at events like PCForum, Burton Group Catalyst and Digital Identity World. It developed lexicon of identity terms to facilitate dialogue between the diverse communities working on similar issues. These groups included "grass roots" small companies thinking about light weight identity systems, large enterprises, vendors, and networks, along with existing standards in the area.

Currently there are 470 people (out of date list of people and organizations) on the mailing list with approximately 3 messages per day. There are currently no active projects underway and most of the old wiki content is on this new wiki.

OpenID Home
OpenID Charter
This Report on the wiki

This is the first report to Identity Commons on activities in OpenID Working Group. This report covers the period concluding on Dec 31, 2007. This report is submitted by Bill Washburn, Exec. Director of OIDF.

Successes
* OpenID Foundation has incorporated as a non-profit in the State of Oregon
* OpenID Foundation has completed the process of developing an Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) regime which has also been submitted to the OpenID community, vetted, and approved as final by the OIDF Board.

Breakdowns / Delays
* OIDF submission of Form 1023 to the IRS for designation as a 501(c)3 non-profit was delayed. It will be submitted in early 2008
* Membership drive for OIDF was not formally announced. It will begin in earnest in the first three months of 2008.

OSIS Home
OSIS Charter at IC
This report on the wiki

Successes
The Open Source Identity System currently has three subgroups. One subgroup works on general OSIS working group support outreach activities such as giving tutorial sessions at IIW. A second subgroup is in charge of finding the best bars for the group to tour after meetings and successful interop events. The third subgroup is responsible for the majority of OSIS work: coordinating interoperability among numerous projects and organizations that produce identity system components.

The Open Source Identity System working group organized two interop sequences in 2007, and began a third. Each interop consisted of a kickoff meeting at which we discussed the general areas of interoperability testing, collaboration tools, and event structures. Then during the next few months, project teams collaborated via the OSIS working group, refined test scenarios, and debugged their code. Each interop concluded with a public event. The interops of 2007 included:

• I1: began in May at IIW 2007a and concluded in June at the Burton Catalyst conference in San Francisco.
• I2: began in Sept at the Digital Identity World conference, and ended in October at the Burton Catalyst Conference in Barcelona.
• I3: began in December at the IIW 2007b and will conclude in April at the RSA conference in San Francisco.

Accomplishments for Q4 2007 include:
* The OSIS I2 interop sequence was completed at the Burton Catalyst conference in Barcelona.
* The Burton Group published an overview of the interop.
* The 14 projects and company participants tested and demonstrated interoperability of:
o 6 identity selectors
o 13 identity providers
o relying parties
o 6 OpenID providers
o 5 OpenID relying parties
* The was an OSIS Tutorial session and a special session planning for the I3 interop sequence at IIW 2007b in December.
* The I3 interop collaboration is proceeding with greatly increased capabilities tested.
* The I3 interop will be completed at the RSA conference in April.

Breakdowns
An impediment has been uncertainty about moving to Identity Commons collaboration tools. As a working group OSIS needs some basic collaboration tools:

• reliable mailing lists that are easy to administer and have web accessible archives.
• a wiki and document repository that is reliable, backed up, and supports authentication from identity systems supported by OSIS such as OpenID and Information Cards.
• a consistent dial-in number for a conference call service
• As the working group has evolved, we have also occasionally encountered issues in which some support from an umbrella organization such as idcommons would be helpful, but we have been unclear on the role of idcommons relative to OSIS.

None of the above issues are really breakdowns, more like slowdowns that we would like to address in the future.

Requests
• We need to work with idcommons to resolve collaboration tools hosting.
• The OSIS group requests interested projects to get involved in the current interop. Testing is happening now.
• We also are always interested in suggestions for future interops.

Announcements
* We are in the process of moving our wiki and collaboration tools to a new subdomain.

The I3 Interop is Under Way
* The OSIS interop site is about to go live
* Interop progress is discussed on this mailing list
* There are over 200 tests planned
* There are lots more participants
* The I3 interop will conclude at the RSA Conference in April in SF

Identity Schemas Home
Identity Schema's at IC
This report on the wiki

Successes
* Community Dictionary Service prototype was demonstrated (thank you Markus and Drummond). This could be enabling technology for this WG's "catalogue"
* James Schoening, having heard about Identity Schemas (ISWG) as well as the Higgins project's ontology efforts, assembled a group of ontology experts interested in contributing to the ISWG. A separate mailing list was established, and there was some lively discussion. Thanks for doing this James.
* Much of the discussion centered on what ontology language to use. As an outcome, this knowledge representation comparison page was created. The general consensus among this sub-community is that OWL is too weak a language for the purpose at hand, and that one based on first order logic is required.
* HOWL (Higgins base ontology in OWL) was hotly discussed. The general conclusion was that HOWL should use RDF reification (and thus relax to OWL-Full instead of OWL-DL) instead of the awkward home-made solution to reification. [Update: the Higgins team is working on an update to HOWL that incorporates this feedback. It should be released in the next few weeks].

Breakdowns
* The discussion on the new list wound down without any "next steps".
* The Higgins team members (notably Paul) have not (due to getting Higgins 1.0 out the door) been able in Q4 to give the discussion much attention. Situation will improve in 2008.

Requests
Little requests
We need help copying/transcoding content of the wiki here http://identityschemas.org (old MoinMoin wiki) to here: Identity Schemas (see the red links--they point back to the old wiki).

Big requests
* We need volunteers to work on the Community Dictionary Service technology.
* We need ontology contributions to populate the CDS.

Announcements
Administrivia:
* Joaquin Miller announced that for conflict-of-interest reasons he could no longer represent this WG at the IC Stewards Council.

XDI.org
XDI.org Charter at IC
This report on the wiki

Successes
* XDI.org volunteers who participate in the OASIS XRI Technical Committee were successful in pushing XRI Resolution 2.0 to the Committee Draft 02 stage and into public review.

* XDI.org volunteers who participate in the OASIS XDI Technical Committee were successful in developing a compact syntax format for XDI RDF (that came directly out of work done at the December Internet Identity Workshop) that is now documented on the XDI TC wiki

Breakdowns
* XDI.org volunteers in the OASIS XRI and XDI Technical Committees need to resolve the issues regarding the two different XDI models that have been developed (the RDF model and the ATI model).

Requests
* XRI Resolution 2.0 Committee Draft 02, which defines the XRDS format and request protocol (formerly “Yadis”) is in public review at OASIS through Feb 1 2008. Feedback from all Identity Commons participants is encouraged.
* The work of the OASIS XDI Technical Committee is going to accelerate significantly in early 2008. Any individual or organization within Identity Commons are invited to join this work.

Announcements
* None at this time.

Successes
We completed the transition from the old MoinMoin Wiki to an OpenID-enabled version of MediaWiki. We also set up an OpenID-enabled Drupal 5 site to host the main Identity Commons web site. Many, many thanks to Fen Labalme for all of his great work in this regard and to CivicActions for hosting our servers.

Breakdowns
We're still severely resourced constrained, especially given the recent proliferation of Identity Commons working groups.

Requests
We could use volunteers to help us maintain and set up the collaborative tools many of our working groups are using. Eekim (at) blueoxen (dot) com

Identity Rights Charter
This report on the wiki

Successes
* An "Identity Rights Matrix" has been suggested, though words and icons are still needed. It is not yet in final form.
* Collaborations:
o Discussion with the proposed Identity Trust working group have revealed similarities that may be useful going forward.
o Similar discussions with the VRM group have begun and look promising.

Breakdowns
* Most people don't know what identity rights are or how they can be used.
* We need to better define the matrix axis titles and provide examples.

Requests
* Help in this working group.
* More work needs to be done to unify the concepts and goals of this group and:
o Identity Trust
o Project VRM
o Link Contracts

Announcements
* In October, Dan Perry stepped aside from chairing this group and Fen Labalme stepped in and is current Steward.

Project VRM Home
VRM Charter at IC

Just before the IIW meeting the Project VRM Steering Committee convened in Mountain View at Google Headquarters. Project responsibilities were assigned to sub-groups, with Standards & Practices, Use Cases, Advocacy and defining the VRM vision among them. A use case of ubiquitous nature was discussed: change of address. This takes into account Privacy, Trust, Information Dissemination, interaction with vendors, involvement of trusted 3rd Parties, and a host of choices and concerns -- all of which would be in the hands of the individual with a VRM solution.

At the IIW meeting the Change of Address Use case was the topic of numerous technical and marketing sessions. VRM as a basic principle and a tenet of aspects of the Identity matter was discussed in numerous sessions.

Following the California meetings the European contingent (who were well represented in both California meetings) put together a schedule of regular meetings. The European Steering Committee members attend the bi-weekly conference call and are making great strides. Members are in discussion with governments regarding standards, incorporation of VRM into process, and other emerging areas.

VRM will be represented at a conference in SF Feb. 4 called Customer Service Is the New Marketing. The first European VRM conference will be held in Munich on the 21st-22nd April at the EIC location (Forum am Deutschen Museum). It is part of 2nd European Identity Conference - 22nd-25th April. Registration for VRM2008 is free of charge

The VRM blog is picking up steam, and a Steering committee team is working on a new "dot com" (ProjectVRM.com) landing page to be ready during the first quarter of 2008. That team will be meeting in Boston/Cambridge during the first week of February.