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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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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 email address above.

That meant that we could work towards unlocking our operating bank balance, cash reserves and the 2 or 3 remaining member dues that had not been authorized by those members to be transferred to Kantara from the IEEE-ISTO affiliation program.

This offers me a further opportunity 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 renewals 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 very first 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 every one of you 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. See we do 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 closed on August 31st 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: 

  • 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. 

New Members: Kantara welcomes Ian Glazer and Patrick Essien as new members. Thank you Ian and Patrick! 

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!

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 Discussion Group to review the survey results and plan the next activities.  
  • 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 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-otto

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!

 

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