Hello everyone
This is the running update from the Executive Director. Have questions or comments? Suggest some added information or edits? Contact ED Colin at kantarainitiative dot org.
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February enabled Kantara's Assurance program to show the results of weeks of intense activity in the Assurance Review Board with two major announcements. The first was Experian's CrossCore Platform Service which was approved under Kantara's “NIST 800-63 rev.3” Class of Approval and gained the coveted Kantara Trust Mark for NIST 800-63 rev.3-conformant services. The second was Excelsior Security Solutions, that became a Kantara Accredited Assessor the last week of February following a recommendation by the Assurance Review Board and Kantara Board of Director’s approval.
February 1st heralded the official opening of calls for proposals for Kantara Initiative Europe's 2019 European Union H2020 grant funded NGI_Trust project with other consortia members GEANT, Fraunhofer, Tecnalia, EFIS and EDN. The call closes April 30th and has received strong interest already with nearly two months remaining. Regardless of whether you are a European-based individual, research institute, start-up or mature company that is building solutions for the Next Generation Internet, we need your help to make those solutions human-centric by developing them to be both scalable as well as privacy and trust enhancing. Our two other bids with a different mix of consortia are looking good! I hope to update you on our progress in due course.
The second week of February saw your European-based staff gather in Vienna for the TIIME workshop brilliantly convened by eGov WG Chair Rainer Hoerbe. We find this a perfect venue to brainstorm longer term strategy and work through detailed plans for both the Assurance program and the R&D program, because we are surrounded by our friends from the Research and Higher Education Federations who regularly attend this conference to engage with each other and with Kantara too, one of the few (if only) industry consortia to be bestowed such honor, given the alignment of our collective ethics and ethos. There were some inspiring ideas flowing from the proceedings in the link above. In addition, I was able to take two sessions on NGI_Trust, with over a handful participants from this event showing a strong interest shown in developing proposals. A significant output from the staff gathering was to learn of the appointment of Ruth Puente as an additional Director for Kantara Initiative Europe, the Estonian incorporated non profit trade association that licences Kantara's brand and artifacts from US incorporated Kantara Initiative Inc for promotion in that region.
While on the subject of R&D, as part of KIPI, the DHS signed off on Phase 3 of Exponent's MOB4PACS project using smartphones as PIV cards with NFC and BLE. This is the final phase of this project which sees this fantastic technology ready itself for commercialization.
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Program, Work Group and Discussion Group Updates:
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