local chapter

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.

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.

The Information Card Foundation is pleased to welcome the newly-formed German Language Chapter to the Foundation. The chapter facilitates activities and discussions about Information Cards among German-speaking people, primarily from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

The first meeting of the chapter was held this week at the European Identity Conference in Munich, and was enthusiastically attended by approximately 25 people representing at least 17 companies and organizations. 7 presentations were made about Information Card projects happening in the region.

The German Language Chapter hosts its own website at http://informationcard.de/.

Willkommen!