Posted 8:23 AM

IIW ages gracefully

We've just finished the fifth Internet Identity Workshop, and it appears that a milestone has been reached - or, perhaps, that a corner has been turned. Phil Windley posted a good, succinct, history of the previous meetings in his review, and I do agree with his conclusion that reputation services appears to be the "next big thing" for IIW. But what I saw this week was a decided maturing of the event - the Concordia people, for example, were there - but spent almost all their time closeted with each other. Likewise, those involved in OSIS spent most of their time planning their next interoperability event.

The 2.0 spec for OpenID was finalized (and released) and discussion begun on the next version. The conversation has moved from "do we need OpenID" to "how can we leverage OpenID?"

Dale Olds (from the Bandit Project) even lead a session entitled "Open source identity systems in the enterprise," a topic that would have been anathema for this group just a couple of years ago.
Not that there was a lack of wild-eyed idealism, mind you, just that it was tempered a bit by progmatic considerations and the possibility that personal, user-centric identity can peacefully co-exist with enterprise-centric identity. Not only are the ID Geeks getting older, they also appear to be getting wiser.