Virtual Identity Dialogue

I attended Internet Identity Workshop this week. The best thing about
this conference is that just about everyone who is anyone in
identity-land was there. When Eve Maler conveyed a meeting on
"Lightweight SAML" -- you had the majority of the people who had helped
sheperd SAML in some fashion.



Of course everyone also learned I cannot say the word
"cannonicalization" - you can occasionally take the boy out of Texas -
but not the Texas out of the boy.



It was also interesting to see InfoCard demostrations. We're all still
figuring what InfoCard actually means to us -- but give credit to Kim
Cameron for doing his best to do this as transparent as possible. As
Kim and I remarked to each other - when you work for Oracle or
Microsoft - you're remarks take on the weight as the UN Security
Council reprensenative for the US. Meaning it's no longer just "you"
speaking - you're also carrying the weight - both good and bad of your
respective organizations.



Also it was interesting to hear about some of the URL-based identity
solutions. While these systems could use some focus -- there's so many
related, but not necessarily interopable protocols - that it's hard to
see which one would you actually "bet" on if your were a CTO.
Personally - I don't want to play kingmaker here. If possible we'd be
standards based at the core while enabling support for as many of these
systems as we could.


Finally on a personal level it was very nice to finally meet Jeff Hodges (we go WAY back
to early LDAP days), Eve (including seeing one of her cross-stiches!)
and of course Kim. And to catch up with old friends like Bob Morgan.