During the wrap-up circle at today’s IIW2008b (which is the acronym for this fall’s Internet Identity Workshop), Phil Windley said that this may not have been the best IIW ever, but that it was the best in a while. I admit that I didn’t start attending until IIW2007a, but this was definitely the best IIW ever for me. (btw, Kaliya, I believe amorphous blobs of chairs are far more egalitarian than circles… Seriously.)
I’ve finally been lurking in Identity Land long enough to know most of the key projects, and many of the key people. Accordingly, the number of relevant and interesting conversations that I manage to find continues to climb with each IIW.
The other thing that I think contributed to my feeling that it was such a good event is that many of the projects in the space are finally reaching a significant level of adoption and awareness. This adoption and awareness is driving people to come together to solve some of the remaining difficult problems before we can break through to the mainstream. It’s also driving some of the traditionally competing technologies in the space to come to an understanding of each other’s technologies, and to look for common ground and opportunities to collaborate on mutually beneficial efforts.
One of the best sessions that I attended was a session led by Paul Trevithik that sought to explore what request the identity community would put to the major browser vendors for inclusion in future versions of their browsers. When people from each of the OpenID, iCard, and SAML communities showed up, many of us who have become familiar with the politics of IIW figured that we were going to reach a stalemate in the first 15 minutes and end up having made very little progress. But it turned out that we all came together and quickly found some common ground. We all readily agreed that if the browser could help a user discover and catalog which credentials he has, and could help match them up to relying parties that can use them later on, we could all get on about our business of actually making our protocols do what our protocols do and rest easy with the knowledge that future web browsers will help us out.
Now that we know what problem should be solved by future browser facilities, we still have some tricky technical work to do to get to a proposal and then still more work to get to an actual prototype. But I’m optimistic that we, the united identity community, can get there.