Lately the faster I go the behinder I get. All the juicy news from Digital Identity World has been remarked on already (including who was hanging out at what bar), but I wanted to point out a favorite item or two.
The 2007 Liberty Alliance IDDY awards are out. The recipients this year are all doing truly interesting things. At a DIDW talk in which the winners got to describe their deployments, Chuck Mortimore discussed how Rearden uses federation to improve the profit margin for its customers, and eBIZ.mobility’s Ram Banin described how they’re harnessing existing payment-processing systems to open up online services. NTT’s Kenji Takahashi essayed a demo of the very cool SASSO system, a personal identity-provider-on-a-phone that lets you achieve strong auth and data-sharing control when you engage in a PC-based web interaction. And Bill Young of the New Zealand State Services Commission showed how NZ is coordinating identity-based services while giving citizens the control they need (and the privacy they deserve according to law). Together these case studies demonstrate the depth and breadth of what’s possible today — something a lot of people may not be aware of.
After the conference closed on Wednesday, some three dozen people participated in a Project Concordia workshop. We heard from Bill Young of NZ here too, along with other deployers who offered advice on solving problems that arise from having to mix technologies. (I notice that the NZ goals have some similarities to the BC government goals shared in an earlier Concordia workshop and at DIDW.) Our subsequent technical deep-dive helped us prioritize the biggest pain points for all these folks — metadata, IdP discovery, and a concern about integrating CardSpace into existing SAML deployments all bubbled up — and we began to plan next steps for improving the situation. Make sure to check out the workshop notes (and consider participating if you aren’t already!).
