OIDF

Just wrapped up a really good week at Digital ID World. Phil Becker and crew did a great job with this conference this year.

There were quite a few meetings and announcements around OpenID that I thought I’d mention in a blog post.

• Orange (aka France Telecom) announced that they are enabling OpenID’s for all 40 million of their customers. They cover a wide-range of mobile, internet and traditional phone customers and they have taken a very interesting slant on doing identity. They are leveraging the physical nature of the mobile devices and DSL modems in their customers homes to further secure the identities they are provisioning. Very interesting. They also announced that in the near future (they had a screen shot) they will enable consumption of third-party OpenID’s. This is in addition to supporting Yahoo! BBAuth and Google’s Gauth as well.
• I saw the first screen shots of the new OpenID website. The folks at Vidoop have been helping us with this and David and I will head out to Tulsa in a few weeks to finalize this sucker and get it live. This is going to really simplify the OpenID site and make it easier for users and developers to get what they want/need.
• We had another IPR meeting over lunch at the conference and David also sent out the first public draft of the proposal to the OpenID general list. The ramifications of this are huge as it will allow larger entities that have been interested in OpenID be able to participate in a much more formal way. I’m really excited that David and Bill Washburn (and everybody else) have been able to get so far so fast.
• There are some very exciting announcements on tap in the coming weeks. We’re shooting for mid-November to make some formal announcements around what’s happening at the Foundation … keep an eye on this space (and many, many others) for more information.

It was a great week and I’m glad I made it out for the conference. The best is yet to come and things are really starting to heat up folks … :-)

Next week is OSCON and there will be a few folks from the OpenID community there presenting (come see my “State of OpenID” talk on Thursday at 10:45am!). I thought I’d take a moment and give a quick update on the state of the OpenID Foundation ahead of that conference.

The OpenID Foundation (OIDF) was incorporated as a 501(c)3 US non-profit on June 17th, 2007 here in the State of Oregon (my home is the temporary World Headquarters). The legal team at Ater Wynne was instrumental in getting this setup for us. Thanks David, Ernie and the rest of the people there.

The OpenID Foundation has been created to help manage all of the legal and infrastructure details that come with a large free/open/libre project. The goal of the OIDF is not to dictate the direction of the OpenID technology; the community already has that well in hand. Instead, the OIDF will be helping develop strategies around intellectual property (more later on this), trademarks, marketing and general evangelism of OpenID. As OpenID gains momentum, we’ll need certain mechanisms in place to ensure the future of the community and the technology and to keep it free from legal encumbrances.

The first motion of the OpenID Foundation board was to setup a bank account. As the Chairman of the Board, I took this on and after talking with folks on the foundations mailing list we decided to go with Bank of America because of their flexibility in working with out-of-country members and their on-line banking. We’ll use this bank account for membership dues, donations and to administer the prizes for the bounty program.

The OpenID Foundation is also lucky enough to have Bill Washburn as the acting Executive Director. Bill is working pro-bono right now and has been for the past few months helping get the foundation setup and going. Bill is a very solid guy and one that I’ll be happy to have at the healm of the OpenID Foundation once its fully going. Bill is tasked with driving membership, managing the daily business of the foundation and working to grow and promote OpenID as a technology.

I’d also like to take this chance to give a shout out to the Board of Directors that has been working tirelessly to get the foundation created:

• David Recordon (Verisign) - Vice chair
• Artur Bergman (Six Apart)
• Johannes Ernst (NetMesh)
• Martin Atkins (independent) - Secretary
• Dick Hardt (Sxip) - Treasurer
• Drummond Reed (Cordance)

If you’re going to be at OSCON next week and are interested in learning more, send me an email or look for the goofy dude with glasses and a Firefox t-shirt and we can talk more in person. If you’re interested in joining the OpenID Foundation as a company or just to learn more and you’re not going to OSCON, you can contact at Bill Washburn at bill at OIDF dot org.