When the Information Card Foundation (ICF) and OpenID Foundation (OIDF) launched the Open Identity Exchange (OIX) at RSA on March 2, I temporarily added the hat of OIX Executive Director. ICF agreed to loan me half time to OIX to work through the startup stages of establishing the industry’s first open trust framework platform provider. For its part, OIDF contributed the time of OIDF Executive Director Don Thibeau to serve as OIX President and board chair, and it has been a tremendous pleasure working with Don, OIX counsel Scott David, and Global Inventures program manager John Ehrig to lay the foundation for OIX.

Now, with the announcement at last month’s Burton Catalyst conference that AT&T has joined OIX, that several new OIX Working Groups are starting up, and that OIX and Kantara have begun collaborating on trust framework infrastructure, the startup phase of OIX is over, and I can finally take off the OIX ED hat.

This does not mean I will be any less involved with OIX, however. On the contrary, as I have been blogging throughout this year, the need for a particular trust framework—one governing data exchange with personal data stores (PDX)—is becoming acute. That need also intersects directly with the work I’ve been doing on the XDI data sharing protocol at OASIS since 2004.

So as fast as I’m taking off the OIX ED hat, I’m preparing to take on another one spearheading the development of a PDX trust framework at OIX. This will be one of the key topics both at the VRM+CRM conference in Boston this coming Thursday and Friday, and also at the Internet Identity Workshop East on September 9 and 10 in D.C. following Gov 2.0.

If you are attending either event and want to know more about PDX and the PDX trust framework, please come to the open space sessions we’ll be holding.