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 digital economy consultancy Ctrl-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 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!

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:

• 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.  

New Members: Kantara welcomes new members Brian Shimik, Don Waugh, Stephen Hutchinson as well as Digi.Me to the Board of Directors.  Great to have you aboard folks! 

Marketing:

• We have a cunning new plan to help members recognise each other at conferences. These should be ready in the New Year.  

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@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 London is next up, followed by ISSE in Paris. See you there!