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From San Francisco the circus moved to Vienna, where long time member and eGov Working Group Chair had organized the TIIME (Trust and Internet Identity Meeting in Europe) unconference. Rainer, and his wife Andrea, assisted by Sabine, were fantastic hosts and steered us on and off trams and through the beautiful streets of Vienna to a historic tavern where Kantara's European members ruminated over items discussed in Kantara's pre-conference workshop. Along with many familiar names, see the proceedings of the TIIME unconference here .
In 2017, Kantara will pivot around a refinement of the existing Mission Statement and sharpen its focus on conformity assessment of its frameworks and specifications, with closer orchestration and re-alignment of WG and DG outputs towards its programs. While Kantara's existing strap-line 'Join, Innovate, Trust' will remain close to our hearts, you'll see and hear more of 'Invent, Innovate, Implement' which talks directly to our outputs.
Those outputs are the world leading and thought leading specifications, frameworks, conformity assessment programs, contributions to ISO SC27, OECD via ITAC, Reports, Recommendations and more. Those outputs are your outputs proposed by members, non member participants, directed-funds organizations and Liaison organizations as things you wanted to see Kantara do in order to improve the digital economy in the areas of identity and personal data, consistent with our Mission that seeks to build a better, safer, more private and equitable online experience for people.
The band of member volunteers that consistently step up to deliver Kantara artifacts such as the Consent Receipt v1.0 and very soon, UMA v2.0, are often the same folks who assist the Board and staff with strategic and operational re-alignments.
We need more of you! Please take that next step and email me at the address above, and let's discuss how you and/or your organization can help Kantara reach its goals either through membership, directed funds or volunteer resources to contribute use cases, expert knowledge, project management, Secretariat resources etc - not for Kantara's own sake - but for your organization's customers, consumers and users of its online services.
We February was not all conferences and play - make no mistake.
Kantara's new Mission statement was given its seal of approval by the Board at its February meeting. It goes to the essence of what we do:
Kantara Initiative is the global consortium improving trustworthy use of identity and personal data through innovation, standardization and good practice
A lot of what you will see from Kantara this year will speak directly to its Mission. It's easy to talk about it and write about the need for as other consortia in our community adept at. But it's darn hard to do.
Subject Matter Experts and Money. That's what it takes. We are blessed with the former and the richness to the conversation they bring. We are constantly challenged by the latter. To those organizations hanging out on Kantara's mailing list or lurking on its Working and Discussion Groups, I say this to you. It is not going to happen. Sitting and waiting for somebody else to invest the time and money to build the artefacts so you can just consume them, you are mistaken. Kantara prides itself on its conviction to maintain low barrier to entry so folks can engage with the work. But unless and until you actually engage with the people and invest in the work yourselves, the value will not follow. So please - get engaged, get out your check-book to direct some funds to the piece of work you want to see Kantara do, and become a part of driving this community forward to build a better, safer and more equitable digital economy.
You'll see a lot of changes in the coming months - a new, simpler membership structure, refreshed ByLaws and Operating Procedures to support a refreshed IPR policy, and announcements about new conformity assessment specifications to deliver our mission to the new emerging standards supported by refresrestructured memberhWe are receiving a lot of interest in Consent Receipt and UMA as tools in the GDPR compliance arsenal right now. And interest in our conformity assessment program for Identity Assurance that is currently deployed just in the public sector but has so much potential in the private sector. There are not many open platforms to develop industry specifications and frameworks and none as accessible as Kantara's. That capability is at the center of Kantara's value to the industries and communities it serves.
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