Greetings folks
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November marked another 'full-on' month for Kantara with , which for me meant four appearances and presentations spanning north America and Europe.
For me, My 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 assist going forward.
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The following week I was back in London, presenting ID Pro at Whitehall Media's six monthly UK IDM conference
The 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.
Last Sunday saw the 6 monthly time skew out of way, and the days are growing shorter and colder for those in the northern hemisphere. With the outdoors less inviting, there's more time for you to get on those Kantara calls and emails for the groups that rely on your ideas and contributions! See you there!
Cheersand the week after the circus moved to Paris. The early part of the week was devoted to the ISSE conference hosted by our newest liaison, EEMA where I 'wet-signed' our Memorandum of Understanding at the evening networking event and the following day appeared on an international panel discussing what it would take to achieve trans-Atlantic interoperability in the identity federation space between one of Kantara's other liaison partners, IDESG with the EU's eID part of eIDAS.
The month's event finished with celebrating the 10th anniversary of WebScience in various countries on November 29th, and the London event featured our dear friend and fellow cohort, Doc Searls on the panel. Another great event.
While the first day of December started with another memorable London conference for me - MEF - which I will talk about more in the next Director's Corner, the outlook for the rest of the month is reflective of the family time ahead. Let's treasure our family time!
Keep warm northern hemisphere folks, and my early good tidings for the upcoming festive season 
Cheers!
Colin
Around the Houses:.
Liaisons:
- Kantara and the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium EEMA the European Association for e-identity and Security, signed a Memorandum of Understanding at IIW.. Paris on November 15th. 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.in Europe combining EEMA's network of relationships with Kantara's programs and innovation development platforms.
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. Board and several Leadership Council Chairs have commenced 'Tiger Team' meetings to re-craft the organization's strategy for 2017. The teams cover the organization's Mission, Activities and Membership. We expect to be report out on the results of this work late February. It is a time consuming but immensely valuable exercise which is bringing forward some really innovative ideas. I look forward to sharing them with you.
New Members: Kantara welcomes new
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member Eli Fisk. Great to have you aboard
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Eli!
Marketing:
- We have a cunning new plan to help members recognise each other at conferences. These should be ready in the New YearStand by for a short end-of-year satisfaction survey of members. All we do, we do for you. So please take a little time to complete the survey to tell us we have things right or where we can improve.
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@kantarainitiativeThe WGs and DGs of Leadership Council now operate a blog, so you can read what's going on in groups you are not regularly attending. See it here
- As always if you have a query or question, staff are only to willing to assist. Email them on staff@kantarainitiative.org
Events:
- You can find the events we hope to see you at here on the events page on the website. IDM UK In the immediate term we have two personal information related events in London is next up, followed by ISSE in Paris. See you therecoming up in December 16 and January 16, hosted by our good friends at Digital Catapult. Meanwhile we are in concentrated planning mode for our 2017 events. Stay tuned folks!