Information Card Foundation

The Information Card Foundation (ICF) has been affiliated with Identity Commons since ICF's founding in June of 2008. Identity Commons is currently a loose-knit affiliation of different groups and organizations working together to create an identity layer for the Internet. It is perhaps best-known for its semi-annual conference, Internet Identity Workshop (now known as “IIW”), which brings together a wide range of people active in the Internet identity community to forge the protocols, policies, and partnerships necessary to produce an identity layer serving all constituencies: people, for-profit companies, non-profit organizations, and governments.

The current Identity Commons is actually the second generation of an organization originally founded by Owen Davis and Andrew Nelson in 2002. That organization subsequently transformed itself in 2005 into the current Working Group structure in order to foster collaboration between a diverse set of groups that include legally incorporated entities such as the ICF, the OpenID Foundation, and XDI.org, as well as internal Identity Commons Working Groups that are not separate legal entities, such as IIW, OSIS, ID Legal, Project VRM, and Kids Online.

Although Identity Commons has always been a non-profit corporation, the second-generation entity has never raised funds beyond its modest operating expenses (less than $5000 per year). This past summer, interest grew in creating a third generation of Identity Commons that could serve as a much more robust “upside-down umbrella” organization for funding and coordinating work across the entire ecosystem of efforts on Internet identity, data sharing, and relationship management.

I'm pleased to announce that as of October 1, Mary is the new Executive Director of ICF. Mary brings a wealth of experience and relationships within user-centric identity community. Having worked alongside Mary in a number of settings, I have every confidence that she'll guide the ICF admirably as we begin our next phase of growth and evolution.

Mary succeeds Drummond Reed, another person well known in the identity community. Drummond's passion for building standards, trust frameworks, and supporting organizations within what might be called the emerging Personal Data Ecosystem has grown to the point where several weeks ago he told the ICF board that he wanted to focus on it full time and that we should initiate a search for his successor.

In February 2009 Drummond was asked by this board on rather short notice if he would serve as our E.D. He cheerfully accepted and immediately tackled the considerable challenge of getting the new ICF website, communications strategy, and organizational infrastructure ready for the successful launch at RSA several weeks later. Since then Drummond has continued to do an exemplary job promoting the cause of Information Cards in countless public and private venues. He has also devoted a significant portion of his time to co-founding, in partnership with the OpenID Foundation, the OIX organization. Drummond also worked alongside Mary Ruddy, John Bradley and other ICF board members to get Information Card technology to be accepted by the US ICAM program. All of these projects have been successful in no small part due to Drummond's tireless efforts, and have benefited from his professional manner and genuine enthusiasm.

--Paul Trevithick, ICF Board Chair

The annual summer Catalyst conference put on by the Burton Group is happening again this coming week in San Diego. A large number of Information Card Foundation members and directors will be in attendance. Here is a list of all the events that are of particular interest to ICF members and others involved with open identity technologies:

Munich, Germany -- Information Cards and ICF members were very active in the European Identity Conference (EIC) in Munich this past week. To begin with, ICF board member Kim Cameron accepted the European Identity Award for “Best Innovation” on behalf of Microsoft for its U-Prove minimal disclosure technology. The award was shared with IBM for its similar Idemix technology. Both solutions were lauded by EIC host Kuppinger Cole as pioneering efforts in enhancing online privacy and security.

Mr. Cameron also gave a keynote address, “Federated Directory meets Minimal Disclosure: Mortal Enemies or Soul Mates?” in which he showed how cloud computing, social networks, and enterprise collaboration demand federation of directory information across trust boundaries to create a distributed information fabric. Mr. Cameron then asserted that, by using technologies like U-Prove, these federations can be built to be consistent with the requirements of minimal disclosure.

Munich, Germany -- ICF Executive Director Drummond Reed, chair Paul Trevithick, and board members Kim Cameron, Pamela Dingle, Jörg Heuer, Anthony Nadalin, Andrew Nash, Axel Nennker, and Sandy Porter are all attending the European Identity Conference this week. Kim Cameron gave a keynote on the first day of the conference on Tuesday covering the next steps for federated identity management, including using Information Card tokens with Microsoft's recently announced U-Prove technology, and what Kim calls "federated directory systems".

The ICF directors and members will hold a special "birds of a feather" breakfast session on the final day of the conference, Friday May 7, starting at 8AM local time outside the main dining room of the conference location at the Deutschen Museum, Museumsinsel 1, 80538 München. We invite all interested ICF DACH chapter members, EIC attendees, and their guests to attend.

San Francisco, CA -- After a year-long collaboration, the Information Card Foundation (ICF) was pleased to join the OpenID Foundation (OIDF) in announcing the launch of the Open Identity Exchange (OIX) at the RSA 2010 Conference.

OIX is the first open identity trust framework provider—a provider of certification frameworks for the providers and consumers of open identity credentials such as Information Cards and OpenID. OIX is based on a new approach to creating wide-area trust networks on the Internet called the Open Identity Trust Framework (OITF) Model. ICF, OIDF, and OIX have jointly published a white paper describing this model, including 12 "Principles of Openness" followed by OITF providers.

"This is a major step forward for the open identity industry," said ICF Executive Director Drummond Reed, who will also serve as the initial Executive Director of OIX. "To serve governments and other online communities that have requirements for specific levels of identity assurance, the industry needed to create a certification program for OpenID and Information Card providers. Now we have done that, and we have done it in a manner consistent with the open standards and open market approach upon which our technologies are based."

ICF will be an active participant in the OASIS IMI Interop to be held next week at the 2010 RSA Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The Interop will focus on demonstrations of the GSA ICAM IMI 1.0 Profile for use of Information Cards to U.S. government identity assurance levels.

Contributors to the ICF presence at the Interop include Avoco Secure, Azigo, the Province of British Columbia, Equifax, Meristic, Microsoft, Openinfocard, and PayPal. They will be demonstrating Information Cards, relying party sites, and selectors compatible with the GSA ICAM IMI 1.0 Profile.

The IMI Interop will be held in the OASIS booth (#2545) on the RSA show floor. The booth will be open:

• 6-8PM Monday March 1
• 11-6PM Tuesday March 2
• 11-6PM Wednesday March 3
• 11-3PM Thursday March 4

Currently IMI Interop presentations are scheduled every two hours during the day in the booth. Direct interop demonstrations will be going on continuously. We invite you to come by the booth and visit us.

ICF will also be participating in a major announcement about the establishment of new infrastructure for online identity assurance – watch for further information here.

Lastly, the ICF Board of Directors will hold a face-to-face meeting from 3-7PM on Thursday March 4 at SPUR, 654 Mission Street (two blocks from Moscone).

ICF Executive Director Drummond Reed just returned from a two-week trip to the EU. He shares the following observations:

My first stop was giving a keynote at the NordSec conference in Oslo, wonderfully organized by Dr. Audun Jøsang of the University of Oslo. The agenda was one of the richest of any conference in my recent memory; I found myself taking notes constantly on talks covering STORK, ID management based on mobile SIM cards, and privacy risks in Web 2.0, among other topics.

The day ended with a panel on “Global identity management – a threat or an opportunity for privacy?” I spoke strongly in favor of the opportunity Information Card technology offers for privacy protection, and how the U.S. government’s open identity solutions initiative is taking advantage of this. That initiative and the ICF/OIDF open trust frameworks project drew a great deal of interest among the largely EU-based audience—its potential for helping “raise the bar” on Internet privacy was one the main themes of the panel.

ICF Executive Director Drummond Reed and OpenID Foundation Executive Director Don Thibeau will present the foundation’s joint Open Trust Framework at the OASIS Identity Management 2009 conference tomorrow at the NIST headquarters in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The theme of the conference is Transparent Government: Risks, Rewards, and Repercussions.

The Open Trust Framework, summarized in the OIDF/ICF joint white paper Open Trust Frameworks for Open Government, is a mechanism that enables relying parties (the websites and services that accept open identity credentials such as OpenID or Information Cards from individuals) to verify that identity providers (the third parties providing such credentials on behalf of the individual) are certified to provide those credentials at the level of assurance (LOA) the relying party requires.

In the case of U.S. government, for example, there are four LOAs defined by NIST and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), each with its own level of identity proofing, security, and privacy requirements. With the Open Trust Framework, U.S. government websites will be able to determine if a particular identity credential meeting the ICAM OpenID 2.0 profile or IMI Information Card 1.0 profile at a particular LOA was issued by an identity provider certified to meet the U.S. government requirements at that LOA.

-Government Embraces Innovative Technology to Support Citizen Participation-

(For more details about this release, please see our Open Identity for Open Government FAQ)

Washington, D.C. - September 9, 2009 - Ten industry leaders - Yahoo!, PayPal, Google, Equifax, AOL, VeriSign, Acxiom, Citi, Privo and Wave Systems - announced today they will support the first pilot programs designed for the American public to engage in open government - government that is transparent, participatory, and collaborative. This open identity initiative is a key step in President Obama's memorandum to make it easy for individuals to register and participate in government websites - without having to create new usernames and passwords. Additionally, members of the public will be able to fully control how much or how little personal information they share with the government at all times.

These companies will act as digital identity providers using OpenID and Information Card technologies. The pilot programs are being conducted by the Center for Information Technology (CIT), National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and related agencies. The participating companies are being certified under non-discriminatory open trust frameworks developed under collaboration between the OpenID Foundation (OIDF) and the Information Card Foundation (ICF) per the federal government Trust Framework Provider Adoption Process.