After piling on too many hats on for the longest time, I’m now peeling some off. First I took off the Open Identity Exchange (OIX) Executive Director hat in August, and now I’m stepping down as Information Card Foundation (ICF) Executive Director and handing the reins to the very able Mary Ruddy.

The reason: I’m narrowing my focus to concentrate on personal data services and the personal data ecosystem. I call this the “second shoe dropping” for user-centric identity: if OpenID and Information Cards addressed the issue of cross-context identity, protocols like UMA and XDI address the issues of cross-context data sharing. When brought together, these can finally bring about the next layer of the Internet that we’ve been talking about for the last decade.

Which makes me very excited about the next one…