Working Group Descriptions

COMMUNITY
The Identity Gang Charter - mailing list for the digital identity community. The gang, formed in 2004, also collaboratively developed a lexicon related to digital identity technologies and issues. The active mailing list has over 500 members. To join, just email [mailto:community-subscribe@lists.idcommons.net Subscribe]. Prior to January 2, 2009, this mailing list was hosted at original Identity Gang mailing list, and registration was required.

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.

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.

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
Information Card Foundation Charter Advance the use of the Information Card metaphor as a key component of an open, interoperable, royalty-free, user-centric identity layer spanning both the enterprise and the Internet. A 501c(6) trade association, ICF is open to any individual or organization. Community members comprise the majority of the Board of Directors. Current Community members are active participants in Identity Commons, Information Cards, Open ID, OSIS for interoperability, Concordia, The Higgins Project, Microsoft CardSpace, the Bandit Project, The Pamela Project, Project VRM, Identity Schemas, and XDI.

Claims Agent Charter The purpose of this working group is to (i) create a forum for the development of standards-based, interoperable, verified claims agent implementations (which would include both open source and commercial components), to (ii) initially focus on specific scenarios that the community and customers work together to implement and deploy end-to-end and (iii) provide funding and other incentives for the development of open source components. A verified claims agent is a set of software components that allows the user to utilize claim-sets from different sources at relying parties (RPs) of their choosing, under their control, using technology that helps to protect their privacy and helps to ensure the security of the system end to end. Verified claims come from sources that do the verification and digitally sign the claims-sets; the agent itself does not do the verification and does not re-sign the claims or sets.

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 501c3 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 identity framework. Higgins is a framework that enables users and applications to integrate identity, profile, and relationship information across multiple data sources and protocols. End-users can experience Higgins through the UI metaphor of Information Cards.

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
ID-Legal Charter  This group was formed at the 2008a IIW - at a session wondering what it would be like to have a conference that was 1/3 lawyers and 1/3 techies in identity and 1/3 other people. It is working on organizing a conference for mid 2009. There is a mailing list you can join.

Kids Online Charter is focused on developing best practices around kids safey online while not loosing sight of the fact that they are kids and want to have fun there too. The group primarily meets face to face and is having its first conference November 13, 2008.

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 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.

DataPortability Charter - The purpose of this working group is to help people to use and protect the data they create on networked services, and to advocate for compliance with the values of DataPortability.

Personal Data Ecosystem Charter Wiki space To get this emerging personal data ecosystem to work for all, there are many interests that need to be brought forward, and different interests that need to be balanced. These include individuals, businesses, governments, advocacy groups, standards bodies, developers, personal data store service providers, government regulators, media, and others. The purpose of The Personal Data Ecosystem is to support all these interests and to define the emergent market models, convergence around technical standards for personal data services and the policies that support them.

Digital Death Charter The primary purpose of this working group is to support the community focused on issues surrounding Death in the Digital Realm. A secondary purpose is to put forward use-cases related to death in the digital realm to the identity community and influence industry to develop norms and standards.

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