Greetings folks
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As I write this in early August, summer lingers in the northern hemisphere. And as folks start to return to work in earnest, the email in-box and the calendar is filling up. Whether it's skiing in the southern regions or bathing at the beach in the north, I do hope you are getting some work-life balance. We don't get so much of that here in Kantara, but we try..
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We have used the quieter pace of summer to review various aspects of the organization, and in particular the value proposition to our members. Members are the life-blood of the organization because without them, we don't have the funds to support the platform and to offer our services to the community such as the ID Assurance Program.
The EU Referendum in the UK at the end of June brought a surprising result, and as a consequence, Kantara has been looking across the EU Member States to determine how to optimise its position in relation to the location of its members, and has engaged some members in that process. We expect to announce an update on our plans later this year.
While some Working Groups have taken a breather over the summer, others have been pushing hard to get their deliverables nailed. It was great to see the Consent and Information Sharing Work Group announce the v0.8 draft Consent Receipt Recommendation approved by the WG to allow implementations to proceed late August and through September at Digital Catapult in London, MyData in Helsinki and expected also on a trial site at Kantara.
Summer also gives folks a chance to push forward with new ideas and innovations that need a platform to further develop. Every week in July has seen a new proposal presented to Kantara for a Work or Discussion Group, which portends for a very exciting future. What is so great about these proposals is the way they relate nicely to the existing work underway and have a service component outcome for the benefit of Kantara and the wider community.
We received a positive response to our call for volunteers to help Kantara drive its mission forward, and it's my pleasure to inform you that we have retained an intern for the remainder of the year and partly into next. Eric Pridgen is a senior, Mathematics major at Winston-Salem State University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and also undertakes research experience at Rutgers University in New Jersey. In due course some of you may encounter him in Working Group and Discussion Groups where you are active.
Last call for Signing the September is well and truly here with all the attendant activity that comes with 'back to business', 'back to work' 'back to school'.
The last few days of August brought a very welcome relief to the Board and staff of Kantara as we received our non-profit status determination from the IRS. If any member wishes to see a copy of the Certificate, please let me know on the address above.
That determination meant that we could work towards unlocking our operating bank balance, cash reserves and the 2 or 3 remaining member dues, all still over at the IEEE-ISTO affiliation program.
This offers a further opportunity for me to thank all those members-in-good-standing that battled through the sub-optimal user experience to transfer their funds to us, March through May. The organization was solely reliant on those funds as well as the member renewals and new memberships for its survival over the summer while the IRS examined our accounts, and it is both pleasing and relieving to know we have that challenge behind us.
The last few days of August heralded the resumption of this year's conference circuit, beginning with MyData 2016. Videos and other proceedings will be available shortly. What a blast! The first ever major pure-play personal data conference certainly lived up to its name, with nearly 500 attendees in Helsinki's balmy welcoming late summer days. Kantara featured from the opening plenary by Antti Jogi Poikola (Jogi) and so it continued throughout the three days, with presentations from Mark Lizar, Maciej Machulak and other Kantarians Justin Richer, Jogi and myself. So many of our members, intending members and participants were there too and I thank you all for your support. The Digital Catapult team along with Mark were also runners up in the Hackathon, but I missed that. By the third day I was already across the water in Tallinn, Estonia, at the 'Future of Identity' Conference. This much smaller conference is focused around strategies to extend Estonia's eResidency Program, something that you can see I have embarked on https://twitter.com/KantaraColin. Before we leave the topic of conferences, I am happy to report that Kantara will again be sponsors of IIW as we continue to support our community - the trust anchors that underpin our society - identity and personal data. We hope to see you all there in October in Mountain View.
The pledge to further develop the notion of an association for digital identity professionals ! The pledge page closes closed on August 31st . Be sure to be signed up here!, in order to be part of the next phase of development.
Cheers!with an amazing 355 responses. Those folks are now completing a survey to express their views on the future shape and form of their association, in advance of the Discussion Group to bring those thoughts to a consensus and to plan the next steps.
Exciting times, eh? Love it!
Cheers
Colin
Around the Houses:
Liaisons:
- Nothing announceable, but progress is being made (albeit slower over summer) and we hope to share more with you later.
- Meanwhile take a summary look at our Liaisons here along with our other relationships of various forms memorialized here. The most recent is the Letter of Intent with DIACC (the Digital Identification and Authentication Council of Canada) which offers great opportunities for future collaboration.
New Activities:
- User Submitted Terms, a sub-group of the Consent and Information Sharing WG is gaining significant interest from the personal data and privacy. Take a look, here. Many thanks to Mary Hodder for her leadership skills here and on completing her successful Chair rotation on the CIS WG.
- An RFP will be released shortly for a tidy-up of some aspects of the Service Assessment Criteria, a critical document in the ID Assurance Program. If this is of interest to you, keep an eye on the website.We expect to announce our next MOU in a couple of weeks. It is with the Board on eBallot right now.
- Our Liaison with the IDESG has resulted in their mapping of the IDESG baseline requirements of the Identity Ecosystem Framework to the Kantara Identity Assurance Framework. This will enable Approved CSPs and IDP's on the Kantara Identity Assurance Program to put the requirements underpinning that approval towards self attesting compliance to the IDEF Registry. The first cross organization meetings on progress begin in September.
New Activities:
- Look out for some new work expecting to spin up in the Personal Data space shortly.
- An All-member ballot has just concluded on an update to the Service Assessment Criteria - the key operational document that controls Kantara's Identity Assurance Framework. You can find the details and results here.
- With the very kind assistance of Kantara member John Wunderlich and Associates, we have a revised Privacy Policy. The changes are minor but I draw your attention to it and ask that you review the revision for your information. Thanks.
New Members: Kantara welcomes
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new members
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Ken Dagg, John Bradley, Walter Hoehn and Eli Fisk. Great to have you aboard folks!
Marketing:
- I do hope you found the summer newsletter sent to you recently, a useful read. We certainly welcome your feedback at staff@kantarainitiative.org .
- We have a new portable banner which will start appearing at events we support. Its first outing will be at the MyData conference in Helsinki at the end of August. At this show, attendees will see a demonstration of the Consent Receipt in action. Stay tuned on social media!We recently received a very kind offer from loyal member, Judith Bush, to distribute Kantara promotional material at an event she is attending. If there is an event you plan to attend that could benefit from knowing more about Kantara please contact staff@kantarainitiative.org to have materials shipped to you. It would be much appreciated.
Program, Work Group and Discussion Group Updates:
- ID Pro: Good progress has been made over the month on the next phase of establishing an association for digital Identity Professionals. The pledge page closes soon! Those 300 or so folks that have signed by August 31st will be surveyed for their views on a range of basic founding principles needed to direct the way forward, and later invited onto a As already noted above, we had a great response to the pledge, and survey responses are nearing 100 with several weeks still to go. A Discussion Group to review the survey results and plan the next activities is ready, and the links to that will be emailed soon to those who pledged.
- KIPI R&D Funding: July and early August has seen a further two whitepapers 'encouraged' by the funders to be developed into Phase 1 Project Initiation Documents for review. Great news! Congratulations to Cirrus Identity and Exponent! We wish you all the best in getting your PIDs accepted. Keep We are aware of at least 12 proposals submitted or in the pipeline. Next month we expect to be able to announce the successful performers from this quarter's submission round, ending in September. Keep those proposals coming folks!OTTO WG: The OTTO WG is generating considerable interest from other federations, in particular Higher Ed: OTTO is developing the APIs a "registration authority" would use to publish and manage federations. It is defining four endpoints: /federations, /federation_entity, /organization, and /schema Right now federation operators create their own software to manage the workflow for organizations joining the federation, and registering entities (like SAML IDPs and SPs). OTTO provide standard APIs for this, and would leverage JSON-LD to prevent duplication of data (as happens today with inter-federation). OTTO is also leveraging a JSON query syntax called JSPath to enable complex searches of the federation or inter-federation data which is more powerful than MDQ (more like ldap search filters, while MDQ is like a dictionary lookup). More info:
- https://github.com/KantaraInitiative/wg-ottoConsent and Information Sharing Work Group: Version 0.8 of the Specification has been released as an Implementer's Draft, to allow deployers to do Proofs of Concept for the Consent Receipt and feed that back to Working Group. After an initial edit by longstanding member Heather Flanagan, Kantara has contracted David Turner of Voltage Gate to lead the final editing work towards the V1.0 required for the All-Member ballot planned for early next year. Digital Catapult London and Open Knowledge in Helsinki are but two of a clutch of early deployers for the Consent Receipt, which is seen by many in the industry as a 'must-have' for GDPR compliance. Many thanks to the tireless efforts in the CIS WG and the Group leaders, Mary, John, Iain and Mark.
Events:
- You can find the events we hope to see you at here on the events page on the website. MyData is fast approaching. Kantara members get a special discount offer on conference registration. Hurry Consent Tech at Digital Catapult in London is next up. See you there!