Just back from the longest vacation of my modern working life, and just in time for good news: Phil Windley has announced an Internet Identity Workshop organized by himself, Doc Searls, Kaliya Hamlin, and myself. It grew out of the “Identity Gang” conversations about grassroots identity that started at Digital ID World 2004 and have evolved rapidly because, as Phil puts it:

Providing identity services between people, websites, and organizations that may or may not have any kind of formalized relationship is a different problem than providing authentication and authorization services within a single organization. Many have argued that the lack of a credible identity infrastructure will eventually result in the Internet being so overrun with fraud as to make it useless for many interesting uses.

As Phil points out in the workshop proposal, the goal is to advance the many threads of the Identity Gang conversations towards consensus about both architecture and governance that will work at Internet scale. The first day will be papers/proposals and the second will be focused discussions on the outstanding issues.

Since a large part of my work with the OASIS XRI and XDI technical committees revolves around helping understand where these fit into both Internet and enterprise identity infrastructure, I look forward to these conversations immensely.