Next-gen identity apps: now playing near you

Fulup Ar Foll, an incredibly talented person and one of my (many) favorite colleagues at Sun, has done it again. He’s got serious chops as a master architect in deploying identity and security services, and he’s also a riveting speaker who can convey the value proposition in terms that are easy for anyone to grok. It’s a close second-best to read slides that he’s put together, so you really need to check out his latest: Next Generation of Identity Aware Applications (PDF), presented at the OASIS Symposium a couple of weeks back.

I’ve blogged in recent months about public-sector/eGovernment uses of SAML2 and Liberty Web Services because I think it makes for an interesting and challenging set of use cases. Citizens and other constituents, such as tax-paying businesses, have a lot of important requirements for their identity-enabled interactions with their governments. Privacy, and in some cases (like e-voting) anonymity, count for a lot. And governments have an interesting set of problems that reflects somewhat of a harsher reality than private-sector enterprises have. Given all this, and since eGovernment has been such a fast-moving space, I think the private sector can benefit from the “debugging” that the public sector has done. Fulup lays out such situations neatly in these slides, and even (gasp) invokes the phrase “user-centric” in describing their architectural requirements.

The presentations from last week’s Liberty eGovernment Workshop in Brussels make a nice counterpart. They were delivered by representatives of government agencies from all over, including several I haven’t touched on before.

So if you’re pining for a trip around the world but can’t get away just now, do the next best thing and check out these resources.