[Chapter-delegates] NEWS RELEASE: Kantara Initiative Reshapes Global Identity Landscape Based on Industry-Wide Collaboration, Announces Initial Focus Areas

[Greg Wood]

All,
For your reference, the Kantara Initiative today will be distributing  
publicly the news release below, which
includes Internet Society efforts.
Sincerely,
-Greg

Kantara Initiative Reshapes Global Identity Landscape Based on  
Industry-Wide Collaboration, Announces Initial Focus Areas

Representatives from Internet Society and Oracle elected to leadership  
positions as growing membership base works to bridge identity  
technologies, initiatives and organizations

June 17, 2009 -  Nearly 45 organizations from the global identity and   
Internet communities today announced the launch of Kantara Initiative,  
a new organization formed to solve the harmonization and  
interoperability challenges that currently exist among identity- 
enabled enterprise, Web 2.0 and Web-based applications and services.  
Kantara Initiative has been founded to collaboratively foster the  
innovation required for broad adoption of interoperable identity- 
enabled solutions across industries, regions and fixed and mobile  
networks. As of today's launch, nearly 20 initial work and discussion  
groups have been proposed by the growing Kantara Initiative community.  
Kantara Initiative will hold a public webcast to overview the new  
organization on Wednesday, June, 24 at 8:00am US PT (3:00pm UTC).

The launch of Kantara Initiative comes after a year of strategic  
planning involving stakeholders representing the entire identity  
ecosystem. This planning focused on how to best move the industry  
forward as the enterprise identity landscape continues to evolve and  
use of social networking and Web 2.0 applications rapidly  
proliferates, with growing interaction between these three markets  
driving new use cases and identity requirements. With zero barriers to  
participation and founding principles based on transparency,  
inclusion, empowerment, innovation, collaboration and openness,  
members of the community are leveraging the successes and experiences  
of each other to drive holistic, interoperable and trusted identity  
solutions into the global marketplace.

"The identity product and service market grows more complex every  
month, and as the market gets more moving parts, there are more and  
more requirements for all those parts to work together. The parts  
aren't going to work together unless the part makers work together -  
and that's why today's announcement is important," said Bob Blakley,  
principal analyst, The Burton Group. "The Kantara Initiative is  
helping to bridge identity initiatives and organizations, which can  
help set the stage for better collaboration in the global identity  
sector."

Board of Trustees and Leadership Council - Fostering Innovation and  
Collaboration Based on a Bicameral Governance Model

The Kantara Initiative has been established based on a bicameral  
governance model where the Board of Trustees and Leadership Council  
work hand-in-hand as peers in steering the direction of the  
organization. The bicameral model ensures that all members and  
participants can have a voice within Kantara Initiative.

With today's news, Roger Sullivan, vice president Oracle Identity  
Management, has been elected president of the 2009 Kantara Initiative  
Board of Trustees and J. Trent Adams, outreach specialist, trust &  
identity, Internet Society, has been elected chair of the Leadership  
Council. Initial Board of Trustee members include AOL, BT, CA, Intel,  
Internet Society, Fidelity Investments, Novell, NRI, NTT, Oracle,  
PayPal and Sun Microsystems. Representatives from Intel and the New  
Zealand government have Leadership Council seats on the Board of  
Trustees.

According to Sullivan, "The problems the global identity industry  
faces today are not just about technology, but rather a combination of  
business policy and privacy requirements, balanced against  
interoperability, usability, as well as technology harmonization. All  
of these issues need to be addressed for identity-enabled solutions to  
succeed and for deployers to leverage their benefits. Kantara  
Initiative is uniquely positioned to address these needs."

A Holistic View - Technology, Policy and Proven Interoperability

The Kantara Initiative structure has been designed to foster the  
development of new identity-related technology and policy initiatives  
from initial proof-of-concept and incubation, to go-to-market and long- 
term adoption strategies. Existing projects moving into Kantara  
Initiative will benefit from additional community input which will  
include identifying new use cases, support for adding functionality,  
and opportunities for proving interoperability with other projects,  
initiatives and technologies.

All output from Kantara Initiative will be based on open standards  
with the goal of ensuring end user convenience, security and privacy.  
A commitment to open standards means the Kantara Initiative community  
will collaborate on projects that make use of all of the identity  
frameworks, protocols and specifications in the marketplace today.  
This means solutions could be built based on one or a combination of  
several IAF, ID-WSF, IGF, Information Card, OAuth, OpenID
SAML 2.0, WS-*, XACML and XDI standards.

Focus Spanning Identity Initiatives - Nearly 20 Work and Discussion  
Groups in Progress Today

The Kantara Initiative name, which is Swahili for "bridge" and has  
Arabic roots in "harmony," was announced at the April 2009 RSA  
Conference and since then members of the identity community have  
proposed nearly 20 initial work and discussion groups. All groups are  
open to every Kantara Initiative member as well as to the public, and  
anyone can suggest a new group to the Leadership Council at any time.  
Groups are formed by members and participants to address common issues  
and problems related to specific industries.

Proposed groups, which are being approved on an ongoing basis by the  
Leadership Council, include Concordia Use Cases, eGovernment,  
Federated Identity Model Agreement & Commentary (FIMAC), Health  
Identity and Assurance, Identity Assurance and Accreditation, Identity  
Provider Selection, Identity Theft Prevention, ID-WSF Evolution (OAuth  
Extensions), Japan, Multi-Protocol Identity Selection, Multi-Protocol  
Relying Party Deployment, Privacy and Public Policy,  
Telecommunications Identity, User Driven Information Technology and  
Volunteered Personal Information (VPI). A list of all of the groups in  
progress is available at http://kantarainitiative.org/wordpress/?page_id=6

"It's clear that Kantara Initiative brings together the right mix of  
collaborators to help shepherd the next generation of identity  
solutions. Specifically, our goal is to facilitate the development of  
solutions that are interoperable, secure and privacy-respecting.  And  
importantly, the work is being done in an open and transparent  
fashion," said Adams. "Collaboration between identity communities and  
initiatives within Kantara Initiative will lead to more trusted  
identity-enabled applications and services. This fits squarely into  
the Internet Society vision of an Internet Ecosystem where the  
continued development and adoption of Internet technologies includes a  
broad range of participants with dispersed ownership and control."

About Kantara Initiative
Kantara Initiative has been formed by Concordia Project,  
DataPortablity Project, Information Card Foundation, Internet Society,  
Liberty Alliance, OpenLiberty.org and XDI.org. The Kantara Initiative  
membership structure is unique in that it has been organized to ensure  
that there are zero barriers to participation. Membership levels allow  
for maximum industry-wide participation and include Participant,  
Member and Trustee categories, which individuals and organizations  
join depending on the size of the organization and type of desired  
participation. The Kantara Initiative membership structure, levels,  
fees and governance model are outlined at http://kantarainitiative.org/wordpress/?page_id=8 
  . A complete membership and chair list is available at http://kantarainitiative.org/confluence/display/GI/Current+Members 
.

About the June 24 Kantara Initiative Public Webcast
Hosted by Brett McDowell, executive director, Kantara Initiative,  
Roger Sullivan and J.Trent Adams, the public webcast, Kantara  
Initiative, Shaping the Future of Digital Identity, takes place on  
Wednesday, June, 24 at 8:00 am US PT (14:00 UTC). The one-hour event  
will provide participants with an overview of Kantara Initiative  
including a review of goals, structure and opportunities for all  
members of the global identity community to participate in the  
organization. Registration and more information is available at http://tinyurl.com/nsw3n5



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Follow Kantara Initiative on SlideShare:
http://www.slideshare.net/kantarainitiative

Follow the Kantara Initiative Blog:
http://kantarainitiative.org/wordpress/?page_id=29


###

CONTACT:

Russ DeVeau
Kantara Initiative
www.kantarainitiative.org
Mobile: 908-251-1549
Office - 954-530-2850
russd at projectliberty.org
russdeveau at comcast.net