Greetings folks
This is the running update from the Executive Director. Have questions or comments? Suggest some added information or edits? Contact the ED colin@kantarainitiative.org
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For me, November in began in Washington DC, as I made my way back from IIW in California. I took the opportunity to catch up with NATE and EHNAC, our Liaison organizations in the Health arena, having had a remote call with DirectTrust a few months ago, and we explored options to reinvigorate the Health Identity Assurance Working Group. I also spent an interesting hour with Joel Minton of login.gov to better understand the work going on there, sharing some of my personal experiences from New Zealand's RealMe (which bears a strong resemblance to login.gov), and how industry could be involved assist going forward. Next
Next stop was Canada (Ottawa) where the XXX
At the other end of October was IIW at its usual location in Mountain View was great for Kantara. The combination of our sponsorship, the many members and supporters attending that declared their affiliation, the continuing interest in the sessions we led in order to talk about the KIPI and ID Pro programs, the Consent Receipt and UMA, all contributed to make a very powerful statement to the event - and it certainly did get noticed. We took the opportunity to sign the MOU with PDEC and had discussions with others that see our values aligning with theirs. Kantara is fast becoming the home for the Personal Data community. The deal with PDEC and Digi.me's replacement of IEEE-SA on the Board is a bell-weather for the organization. While IIW itself seemed consumed with Blockchain-related aspects of identity, there were some great sessions on personal data, VRM and the W3C's Verifiable Claims task force.
We finished the week in California with a strategy and planning meeting with Board and Leadership Council representatives at Forgerock's San Francisco office. Look out for those outputs early next year. Kantara liaison DIACC was holding 2 days of events for industry to dovetail onto the Government-only International Identity Summit. It was great to see so many members, Board members and non member participants on the podium and in the audience at this well attended event. I gave a short presentation that analysed where Governments invested member dues, time, or resource into industry consortia (not necessarily consistent) and joined a panel of government and industry representatives discussing the challenges facing pan-jurisdiction identity today and the ways these are being tackled. President Allan and I took the opportunity to present Joni Brennan, immediate-past Executive Director, a gift of appreciation from the Board on behalf of the members. A big shout-out of thanks to Kantara member 2Keys, who gave up some of their presentation slot to allow us to carry out this delightful task.
Progress towards establishing the association for digital identity professionals continues apace. A survey of those who pledged their support to the idea, was conducted in late September, to seek views on the base principles of the proposed organization, followed by the opening of the Discussion Group to consider the results and develop projects for specific items. By the numbers it looks like this: 355 pledgees in total of which 297 gave us permission to contact them with the survey and 136 completed it, representing a very encouraging 45.7% response rate. The Discussion Group held its first meeting towards the middle of October and has met weekly on Wednesday ever since.
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- Kantara and the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium signed a Memorandum of Understanding at IIW.. The MOU aims to facilitate collaboration between the two organizations and act as a catalyst for further synergies in the identity and personal data community.
- A further liaison was approved in October and will be announced during November. Stay tuned for details.
New Activities:
- The User Submitted Terms project is making good progress, and the Consent and Information Sharing work group is planning a range of new activities for next year.
- Using its Category C Liaison with ISO SC27, Kantara submitted comments to Working Group 5 on two projects for the meeting in Abu Dhabi in the last week of October. The projects in question were ISO 29003 Identity Proofing and the Study Period on potential amendments to 29115 Entity Authentication Assurance. If you are interested in joining the Board's Liaison Sub Committee to view ISO standards drafts and are a member in good standing please request access from staff@kantarainitiative.org. ISO places significant IPR and copyright obligations on Liaison organizations and this requires Kantara to keep these documents restricted - one of the very few restricted areas on Kantara's website.
New Members: Kantara welcomes new members Brian Shimik, Don Waugh, Stephen Hutchinson as well as Digi.Me to the Board of Directors. Great to have you aboard folks!
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- We have a cunning new plan to help members recognise each other at conferences. These should be ready in the New Year.
Program, Work Group and Discussion Group Updates:
- Digital Identity Professionals: As already noted above, we had a great response to the pledge, and from those pledgees, the survey and the Discussion Group. We appreciate that the list grows longer each week, for folks who, for a variety of reasons, missed the deadline for signing the pledge, and want to get involved and contribute. We expect to open the channels again to contributors early next year.
- Legal sub group of UMA: Attention legal eagles and closet lawyers! There have been some really good conversation in this group and on account of that some directed funding support has emerged to develop those conversations into a tangible valuable deliverable. As soon as Eve can release details, she will.
- eGovernment Work Group: The group is preparing a discovery project to locate and analyse Government identity schemes recently introduced, in operation, or recently closed. eGov Chair Rainer, led a similar project around 5 years ago and the comparison between then and now should add significant value to the community's understanding of this sector of the community. If you can point the eGov folks to links to research papers, reports or similar data assets please email staff@kantarainitiative.org
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