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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October has been book-ended by conferences that showcased our members and non member participants.
We entered the month with a good representation of our London based members having attended the Personal Information Economy (PIE) conference in London on September 28th hosted by marketing consultancy CRTL-Shift. It was a great success for Digi.me, JLinc Labs, Meeco and MyWave with some interesting sessions which included the launch of the Sovrin Foundation, with founders familiar to Kantara.
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.
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 time skew out of way, and the days growing shorter and colder for those in the northern hemisphere. With the outdoors seemingly 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!
Cheers
Colin
Around the Houses:
Liaisons:
- 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:
- 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 new members Ken Dagg, John Bradley, Walter Hoehn and Eli Fisk. Great to have you aboard folks!
Marketing:
- 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: 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: 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!
- Consent 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. Consent Tech at Digital Catapult in London is next up. See you there!