Identity is a Presidential Issue

It is probably not surprising that the current White House is interested in identity. To some extent, Obama’s campaign was all about identity – from the need to publish his birth certificate to quieten the slightly nuttier rumour mongers to his reluctance to trade on his racial and religious background as part of his campaign.

As part of an open social White House, Obama is encouraging federal sites to make use of OpenID. Immediately, we see a bunch of major companies signing up to be OpenID identity providers. Of course, it is actual in the interests of all of these companies to be identity providers – there is a significant value to be had in identity information and companies would much rather manage these identities than let them be locked away behind federal identity systems. I’d be much more excited if any of these companies were properly embracing OpenIDs as consumers – and by this I mean with no need to provide additional information, register separately etc etc as we have seen with the much lauded Facebook adoption of OpenID that amounts to little more than account linking.

What is much more interesting is the announcement of the Open Identity Initiative – an initiative working with InCommon, Kantara, the OpenID Foundation and the InfoCard Foundation across a range of standards to provide efficient access routes to federal resources. This is where the benefits of working with an open standard access management solution really begins to show, and helps demonstrate how shibboleth-based federations can work well with other standards based solutions.