Working Group Descriptions

COMMUNITY
The Identity Gang Charter - mailing list and face-to-face discussions support the "ongoing conversation about what is needed for a user-centric identity "metasystem". The gang formed in 2004 and developed a lexicon - a common language to talk about user-centric digital identity technologies and issues. The active mailing list has over 500 members on it - to avoid spam registration is required. Request to join mailing list.

Internet Identity Workshop Charter supports face to face conversation about internet-wide digital identity and it's implications. User-centric identity has been a topic of particular interest. This twice a year event aims to support the whole marketplace, especially individuals contributing their voice in open inclusive conversation. These events have a reputation of being incredibly effective for getting real work done and moving the industry forward.

Newbies 4 Newbies Charter - This working group was formed at the Dec 2007 Internet Identity Workshop to support by a group of "newbies" to connect with their peers who were inspired by the community but wanted to make sure documentation and material about the topics in the community were more accessible. They have regular conference calls and are working on the development of the Starting Points page.

BUSINESS
VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) Charter This group grew out of Doc Searls original 'rental car use case' put forward at Digital Identity World 2004. VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, is the reciprocal of CRM or Customer Relationship Management. It provides customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties. Project VRM is currently under Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law. Participants are working to create the ecosystem of tools, protocols, and services that help users manage vendor relationships. It has five committees, ,Vision, Standards, Organization, Usage and Compliance. There are several active mailing lists, a blog, regular conference calls and an community of software vendors working on building standards based tools to make it real.

TECHNOLOGY - STANDARDS, INTEROP and CODE
OpenID Charter The purpose is to advance development, implemention, and adoption of the OpenID framework of specifications for user-centric identity. This working group is organized as a 501c6 non-profit corporation. The group is open to any individual or organization interested in the advancement of OpenID. Specifications and open source code are maintained by meritocracy.

OSIS (Open Source Identity Systems) Charter OSIS brings together many identity-related open-source projects, and synchronizes and harmonizes the construction of an interoperable identity layer for the internet from open-source parts. Its first deliverable is interoperability with Microsoft CardSpace, although OSIS also encompasses alternate technologies such as OpenID and SAML.

This is one of the most active groups in making the metasystem vision come alive and has participation from a range of both big and little technology vendors. They are having their third major Interop Event with over 200 tests through to the RSA Conference in April 2008.

Identity Schemas Charter To promote interoperability between identity systems by making it easier to find, understand, and reuse the semantics of identity attributes defined in existing schemas. They have clearly articulated the problem space and deliverables to address it. There is an active mailing list and face to face meetings happen at events like the Internet Identity Workshop and Data Sharing Summit.

Higgins Project Charter Higgins is an open source Information Card Project. Information Cards (aka InfoCards or I-Cards)put you in control of your personal data. Each card represents a slice of the digital you (or a friend of yours) held in some data silo. Any kind of information: your preferences, favorite songs, employee id numbers, drivers licenses, affiliations, your blood type, ...you get the idea, can be accessed using a card.

SAML Commons Charter The purpose of this working group is to advance development, implemention, and adoption of SAML, in particular by producing SAML profiles that enable its use with other technologies such as XRI, OpenID, etc.

XDI Commons Charter The purpose of this working group is to advance practical deployment, usage, and best practices for the XDI (XRI Data Interchange) protocol under development by the OASIS XDI Technical Committee.

Pamela Project Charter The Pamela Project exists to information-card enable popular open source web frameworks, with the goal of allowing administrators to install rather than code information card support into their sites. It also is working to make it easier for people of all skill levels to understand and use this technology.

SOCIAL / LEGAL / POLICY
Identity Rights Agreements Charter - This Working Group seeks to define a small set of legal agreements, called identity rights agreements (or data sharing agreements) that may become widely used as a simple, one-click mechanism for individuals to specify the terms under which they agree to share personally identifiable data with another party. These are often compared to Creative Commons licenses, however they also differ in several important ways.

XDI.org Charter - The purpose of this working group is to provide community governance of open public infrastructure based on the XRI & XDI standards.

ID Futures Charter The Purpose of the Identity Futures Group is to engage in interactive (shallower) and indepth consideration of potential future events and scenarios for an identity layer of the web. The first step in this was at Digital Identity World 2007 where we developed 50 future identity related events and mapped them. More scenario development and planning is being coordinated.

ID Media Review Group Charter "The Book Club" is here to support the Identity Commons community engaging with books, movies and other media that cover identity related topics. We do this by collecting a bibliography and by reviewing and discussing these media. We use the issues raised by these works to inform our work innovating the identity layer of the web and help us understand and address the social, psychological, legal, privacy, security, regulatory and ethical issues. The bibliography is growing and further collaboration is planned to engage with these works.

Photo Group Charter - The photo group aims to serve as a community hub for identerati with interests in photography, as a gallery in which identity community photographers can display their work, and as a resource for people looking for photographs which illustrate aspects of identity.

IC Operations
Identity Commons has at its core a stewards council. Groups within the commons support the operations of the commons.

IC Evangelism & Marketing Charter Provide content that will help Identity Commons, its member groups, and individuals more effectively communicate the goals, principles, and messages of Identity Commons. Assist in any evangelism efforts to bring appropriate working groups and individuals to become Identity Commons members.

IC Collaborative Tools Charter The purpose of this Working Group is to discuss, propose, manage, and maintain the online collaborative tools used by Identity Commons. We strongly emphasize interoperability and dogfooding. We want our tools to mirror the work done by the other Identity Commons Working Groups and the larger identity community. In order to further progress in tool interoperability, we will only use Open Source tools for our work. Any modifications we make to Open Source tools will also be Open Source.