Difference between revisions of "OSIS Agreement"

Revision as of 21:25, 19 June 2006

As digital identity technologies and projects proliferate, it has become increasingly difficult for both members of the various initiatives and the market as a whole to understand and manage their relationships. This has created confusion in the marketplace, caused a potential duplication of efforts, and slowed adoption of the technologies.

On the sidelines of the Harvard/Berkman Identity Mashup Conference June 19-21, 2006, the leads of a number of initiatives discussed what could be done to not only remedy this situation, but to establish an organizational -- and as soon as possible, technical -- framework by which participating projects can synchronize their efforts, build around common software interfaces, and enable a marketplace of interoperable digital identity software and service components to emerge.

They have agreed as follows:

1. They will establish the "OSIS" working group, which has existed informally for some period of time, as a working group under the reconstituted Identity Commons 2.0 organization.
2. The OSIS working group will have a steering committee, which will consist of the project leads of open-source digital identity projects, one member per project.
3. This working group is chartered:
   1. to establish architectural agreement on the key interfaces between the various open-source digital identity software and service components under development;
   2. to synchronize the projects in a manner that avoids unnecessary duplication of efforts and reduces the potential of forking;
   3. to assist in the assembly and quality assurance of distributions and products that use components from multiple projects;
   4. to track and resolve cross-project issues as they arise;
   5. to operate an electronic infrastructure (e.g. mailing lists, wikis, issue tracking systems etc.) to support this effort.
4. This working group will be open to new participants who:
   1. publicly commit to the goal of internet-scale digital identity interoperability across projects, protocols, companies and platforms;
   2. publicly commit to the goal of enabling a pluralistic technology and business ecosystem for digital identity product and service components that compete on the merits rather than based on any one entity's control over a majority of the stack.
5. This working group's steering committee will be open to new participants who represent open-source projects related to digital identity, one member per project, and nominated by that project.

The initial members of the OSIS working group steering committee will be as follows:

• Paul Trevithick (Eclipse/Higgins Project, Social Physics)
• Dale Olds (Bandit Project, Novell)
• Michael Graves or David Recordon (Apache/Heraldry Project, Verisign)
• Mike Jones (Microsoft)
• Johannes Ernst (OSIS Project, NetMesh)

Further, there was agreement on the first substantive issue. Going forward,

1. the Apache Heraldry project will focus its work on:
   1. relying party,
   2. light-weight identity provider, and
   3. STS for managed cards.
2. the Eclipse Higgins project will focus its work on:
   1. client code, including an identity selector, and
   2. STS for self-issued cards.