OSIS Agreement

DRAFT

As digital identity technologies and projects proliferate, it has become increasingly difficult for both members of the various initiatives and the market as 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 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. represent open-source projects related to digital identity, one member per project, and nominated by that project;
   2. publicly commit to the goal of internet-scale digital identity interoperability across projects, protocols, companies and platforms;
   3. 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 based on any one entity's control over a majority of the stack.

The initial members of the OSIS working group 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 perform all open-source Identity Selector
   1. relying party,
   2. light-weight identity provider, and
   3. self-hosted STS work.
2. the Eclipse Higgins project will perform all
   1. client-side code and
   2. independent STS work.