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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November marked another 'full-on' month for Kantara, which for me meant four appearances and presentations spanning north America and Europe.   

My November in began in Washington DC, as I made my way back from IIW in California.  I took the opportunity to catch up with NATE and EHNAC, our Liaison organizations in the Health arena, having had a remote call with DirectTrust a few months ago, and we explored options to reinvigorate the Health Identity Assurance Working Group. I also spent an interesting hour with Joel Minton of login.gov to better understand the work going on there, sharing some of my personal experiences from New Zealand's RealMe (which bears a strong resemblance to login.gov), and how industry could assist going forward.  

Next stop was Canada (Ottawa) where Kantara liaison DIACC was holding 2 days of events for industry to dovetail onto the Government-only International Identity Summit.  It was great to see so many members, Board members and non member participants on the podium and in the audience at this well attended event.  I gave a short presentation that analysed where Governments invested member dues, time, or resource into industry consortia (not necessarily consistent) and joined a panel of government and industry representatives discussing the challenges facing pan-jurisdiction identity today and the ways these are being tackled. President Allan and I took the opportunity to present Joni Brennan, immediate-past Executive Director, a gift of appreciation from the Board on behalf of the members. A big shout-out of thanks to Kantara member 2Keys, who gave up some of their presentation slot to allow us to carry out this delightful task.

The following week I was back in London, presenting ID Pro at Whitehall Media's six monthly UK IDM conference and the week after the circus moved to Paris. The early part of the week was devoted to the ISSE conference hosted by our newest liaison, EEMA where I 'wet-signed' our Memorandum of Understanding at the evening networking event and the following day appeared on an international panel discussing what it would take to achieve trans-Atlantic interoperability in the identity federation space between one of Kantara's other liaison partners, IDESG with the EU's eID part of eIDAS.  

The month's event finished with celebrating the 10th anniversary of WebScience in various countries on November 29th, and the London event featured our dear friend and fellow cohort, Doc Searls on the panel. Another great event.     

While the first day of December started with another memorable London conference for me - MEF - which I will talk about more in the next Director's Corner, the outlook for the rest of the month is reflective of the family time ahead. Let's treasure our family time!  

Keep warm northern hemisphere folks, and my early good tidings for the upcoming festive season

Cheers!

Colin  

Around the Houses:.

Liaisons: 

• Kantara and EEMA the European Association for e-identity and Security, signed a Memorandum of Understanding Paris on November 15th. The MOU aims to facilitate collaboration between the two organizations in Europe combining EEMA's network of relationships with Kantara's programs and innovation development platforms.    

New Activities:

• The Board and several Leadership Council Chairs have commenced 'Tiger Team' meetings to re-craft the organization's strategy for 2017.  The teams cover the organization's Mission, Activities and Membership. We expect to be report out on the results of this work late February. It is a time consuming but immensely valuable exercise which is bringing forward some really innovative ideas. I look forward to sharing them with you.  

New Members: Kantara welcomes new member Andi Hindle and Eli Fisk. Great to have you aboard Andi and Eli! 

Marketing:

• Stand by for a short end-of-year satisfaction survey of members.  All we do, we do for you. So please take a little time to complete the survey to tell us we have things right or where we can improve.  

Program, Work Group and Discussion Group Updates:

• The WGs and DGs of Leadership Council now operate a blog, so you can read what's going on in groups you are not regularly attending. See it here
• ID Pro DG has split deliverables into 4 project streams: Body Of Knowledge, Governance, Membership and Services, and Code of Practice. ID Pro is aiming to open the DG to further membership in late February once this phase of pre-formation is complete. 
• As always if you have a query or question, staff are only to willing to assist.  Email them on staff@kantarainitiative.org        

Events:

• You can find the events we hope to see you at here on the events page on the website.  In the immediate term we have two personal information related events in London coming up in December 16 and January 16, hosted by our good friends at Digital Catapult.  Meanwhile we are in concentrated planning mode for our 2017 events.  Stay tuned folks!