Introductory Letters

From IIW

From Mary Ruddy – Chair of the Identity Commons Stewards Council

The Internet Identity Workshop holds a special place among Identity Commons working groups. It is an event where anyone and everyone interested in working towards a shared vision of a decentralized, user-oriented identity layer for the Internet can come together and make things happen.

Part of the magic of IIW is that you never know what is going to happen ahead of time – and this event really delivered – featuring demonstrations of new technologies, conversations to create new standards, and discussions to forge new business alliances.

If you are not already doing so, I invite you to continue the energy sparked by IIW 2008b by joining one of our working groups. You can find a list of them and their descriptions at the end of this document and online here

I would like to thank all the stewards 

   * Chris Allen (IC Evangelism & Marketing)
   * Charles Andres (Information Card Foundation)
   * Bob Blakley (IdMedia, Photo Group)
   * Peter Davis (SAML Commons)
   * Pamela Dingle (Pamela Project)
   * Nicholas Giovotovsky (Identity Futures)
   * Kaliya Hamlin (Internet Identity Workshop)
   * Iain Henderson (VRM)
   * Jeff Hodges (ID-Legal)
   * Fen Labalme (Identity Rights Agreements)
   * Dale Olds (OSIS)
   * David Recordon (OpenID)
   * Drummond Reed (XDI Commons)
   * Chris Reynolds (Newbies4Newbies)
   * Mary Ruddy (Higgins)
   * Denise Tayloe (Kids Online)
   * Paul Trevithick (Identity Gang, Identity Schemas)
   * Bill Washburn (XDI.org)

For their active participation that makes this community thrive.

Looking forward to seeing you at IIW 8 (2009a)!

=mary.ruddy Chair of the Identity Commons Stewards Council

  • Skype: mary.ruddy
  • Y!: maryruddy2
  • P: 617-290-8591
  • E: mary at mersitic.com


From Kaliya Hamlin – Co-producer and Facilitator of IIW

This document comes at a real milestone for the IIW community. The Internet Identity Workshop is now 3 years old and the Identity Gang that it grew out of has been meeting for 4 years. Many members of the community have been working on aspects of the community vision for many more years before that.

The energy momentum of the community continues to build and this year major internet portals are adopting technologies that have been evolved in the community. There is an increasing awareness that open standards are essential to preventing identity lockin in walled garden silos. We have come a long way but there is still much more to do to forfill the purpose of Identity Commons – to support, facilitate, and promote the creation of an open identity layer for the Internet -- one that maximizes control, convenience, and privacy for the individual while encouraging the development of healthy, interoperable communities. We need to continue to work together enhancing the communication between working groups and raising awareness of our activities.

We would not be here today without the contributions of some key people and communities.

  • The original founders of Identity Commons Owen Davis and Andrew Nelson along with early pioneers working with them including Fen Labalme, Victor Grey, Nicholaj Nyholm, Bill Washburn, Drummond Reed, Joel Getzendaner, Andy Dale, Christopher Allen, Mike Mell, and Eugene Kim.
  • The second generation Identity Commons evolved in the summer of 2006 and arose out of a community conversations that included key input from John Ramer, Bill Aal, Brett McDowell, Dale Olds, Mary Ruddy, Paul Trevthick our lawyer Dan Perry.
  • The thought leadership of Kim Cameron, Doc Searls, Phil Windley, Dick Hardt, Johannes Ernst, Pam Dingle Mary Rundle, Bob Blakely, Jamie Lewis, Ben Laurie and everyone who actively blogs and writes about the issues around the technologies that are being developed.
  • The community stewardship of key online spaces like Planet Identity by Pat Patterson and the Story of Digital Identity Podcast that Aldo Castaneda produced.
  • Everyone diving in and building new technologies, applying old technologies and getting open standards evolved to make it all work.

IIW would not be possible with out the community that gathers there or the sponsors that help support our gathering. We need to thank all of our sponsors throughout the years

  • AOL
  • Novell
  • Microsoft
  • British Telecom
  • Liberty Alliance Project
  • Ping Identity
  • Plaxo,
  • Vidoop
  • Google
  • Adobe
  • Cisco
  • OASIS IDtrust
  • CommerceNet
  • SXIP
  • Higgins Project
  • Bandit Project
  • Rel-ID
  • Symplified
  • Applied Identity
  • Ouno
  • Information Card Foundation
  • Authentrus
  • Planetwork
  • ClaimID

And in particular those that supported this event

  • Ping Identity
  • Microsoft
  • Vidoop
  • Plaxo
  • Commercnet
  • Google
  • Cisco
  • Ouno
  • Rel-ID
  • Poken
  • OASIS IDTrust
  • Information Card Foundation
  • Sunkist Naturals


Here is a brief explaination of how IIW works and what this book contains. On Monday we host an introductory afternoon where industry leaders are invited to present about core technologies that relate to user-centric technology. Attendees are also give a one pager packet that contains summaries of all the different projects in the community. The list and most of the one pagers can be found on this page. You will find the copy and some slides excerpted of the presentations at the start of this packet

Tuesday morning we gather all together to create our agenda for the next two days. The methodology we use is called Open Space Technology and any one in attendance can put forward a topic for discussion, an idea they want to present or a question they hope to get answered. They are written on 8.5x11 paper and posted on two paper covered walls. Over the course of two days we have ten one hour sessions. Notes were take at virtually all of them and this book of proceedings contains those notes.

Each session has a title, a convener, the notes taker and a list of attendees. We list the people who signed the sheet saying the attended the session so if you know them and want to know more about what happened you can ask them. All these notes can also be found on the wiki and each session has its own page there - this is so you can to make changes and add updates. If you need a web reference to blog about some of the things in here please use the URL for the session to link to the material.

At the closing of Wednesday we do an open awards ceremony and the awarders along with the reason for their giving to the awardee is listed at the close of the proceedings.

We encourage blogging in the community - the tag for this event is IIW2008. If you have a blog and would like to be included in the community blog Planet Identity http://www.planetidentity.org - just make a request to Pat Patterson.

We also have a by request community mailing list that is google group http://groups.google.com/group/idworkshop that you are most welcome to join.

Identity Commons is an active community with many groups working on the social, technical and legal aspects of an identity layer of the web. Please read the list of groups that are at the end of the proceedings you would be most welcome to join any that are working on topics of interest to you. If there is a topic that you think it important and would like to see it be part of the community it is also possible to start a new group or have an existing group/entity become an active part of this community too. Myself, Mary Ruddy or any of the Stewards can answer questions you might have.

I look forward to the coming six months, until the next IIW May 18-20, 2009 and the events in between where we will meet and continue to move this industry forward.

Regards, =Kaliya Hamlin

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