open source

On the ICF mailing list earlier this week, ICF member Markus Sabadello, a leader of several Information Card-related open source projects, announced the availability of CardGears, a hosted service for web sites wishing to issue Managed Information Cards.

As Mr. Sabadello points out, Managed Information Cards can be issued by any website, whether just to provide a simpler and more secure sign-in mechanism, or to expand their brand to becoming part of the user experience every time a card is used. This website issuing a managed card is authoritative for the data on it. Technically, this requires two components:

• A card issuing component. This produces and sends to the user a card file (in the .crd format) each time a new card is issued.
• A Security Token Service (STS). This is the component that provides the claim values (identity information) on a card, such as first name, last name, e-mail address, etc. The STS is invoked every time a user uses or previews their card.

Mr. Sabadello explains, “CardGears makes it as simple as possible to operate both of the above components. First, you can design, issue and modify cards by using the intuitive web interface, without any programming at all. Second, you can use various APIs to integrate the CardGears service with your own applications. And you can mix and match each of these two approaches as needed for your site.”

There are currently has four demo sites illustrating various aspects of Information Cards and CardGears:

At DIDW in 2007, the term 'user-centric' identity was called 'new school' identity. Kim Cameron introduced the term claims as a way of accurately generalizing the data fields on Information Cards. But the concept of Information Cards as a metaphor to wield the claims that others made about you was not the overarching meme at DIDW last year.

But at DIDW 2008, Information Cards and the Information Card Foundation have moved mainstream.

The Higgins Project, the basis for open source information card implementations demonstrated by Novell (The Bandit Project) Oracle, Parity, and IBM, has created an open source implementation of Information Card selectors compatible with Microsoft CardSpace. A SAML-plug-in for Higgins was built for Google. Where there used to be one organization (Liberty) promoting SAML, there are now a triumverate of organizations -- Liberty has been joined by the Open ID Foundation supporting Open ID and the Information Card Foundation supporting Information Cards. Thus the Venn of Identity diagram from Concordia's Eve Maler now has active established organizations in each sphere.

Examples of the impact Information Cards had on this conference: