2018: March

Owned by Colin Wallis (Unlicensed)
Last updated: May 02, 2018
4 min read

Hello everyone

This is the running update from the Executive Director. Have questions or comments? Suggest some added information or edits? Contact ED colin at kantarainitiative dot org.

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Spring is here... but who knew! At least the time slew is behind us with Kantara's northern hemisphere community moving forward an hour while our colleagues in the south move back for winter. Certainly, activity levels in Kantara have a spring in their step with that optimistic, anticipatory feel to them.  

March saw a continuation of high levels of downloads from our Reports and Recommendations web repository that have been evident since the begining of the year.   

March also saw a high level of renewing members and new members. For the 3 months ending March 31st, we welcomed new members iWelcome from the Netherlands, Trunomi from the Carribean, DataFund from Denmark, Reliable Identities from the US, Unify Solutions from Australia, Sphere Identity from New Zealand and Dylan Woodburn as an individual contributor. We welcomed back renewing members New Zealand Goververnment (Dept of Internal Affairs), Nixu from the Netherlands, SecureKey Technologies from Canada, Cirrus Identity from the US and individual contributors Andi Hindle, Mikael Ates and William Nelson.  It's great to have you all with us here at Kantara and we look forward to working together with you to advance the industry. 

As they often do for me, the month began with calls to our members. In this instance our Approved and Trust Marked credential service provider Zentry, that part of the Verizon/Synchronoss partnership that provides the identity-related services. My first conference of the month was the London leg of the Event Creation Network's KYC and AML Summit series.  I moderated a panel primarily focussed on privacy and was joined on the stage by Paul Simmonds, the lead for the non-profit Global Identity Foundation, Gouri Khatua, most recently with RaboBank before commencing her own GDPR consulting firm, and Charlie Walton from Mastercard. These conferences follow a different but quite successful mash-up of keynote, panel and workshop with the same folks showing up year after year. 

By mid-month my focus was on our many liaisons. The first was drafting our Liaison Statement and reviewing our comments on ISO 29184 (Guidelines for online privacy notices and consent) ISO 27552 (Enhancement to ISO/IEC 27001 for Privacy Management - Requirements) to go to ISO SC27 WG5 for the upcoming meetings in Wuhan China later this month. A few days later saw me discussing the role Kantara could play in the ONC's Trusted Exchange Framework Common Agreement in US Healthcare together with Kantara members Experian and ForgeRock in a dial-in call to the HIMSS conference in Las Vegas, all the while advancing no less than three separate bids for H2020 EU grant funding via Kantara Europe, and finally, 'circling the wagons' for Kantara's panel at the KNOW Identity conference with panelists Mary Hodder from IDESG, Scott Shorter from Kantara Accredited Assessor KUMA, Tracy Hulver for Kantara Approved CSP ID.me and Leadership Council Chair Andrew Hughes. The topic was 'Service Provider Certification: Who Cares Anyway?'. We worked through what certification is, the different stakeholder perspectives, and we had some great comments from the full house.    

The much heralded members-only release of the Service Assessment Criteria for the NIST SP 800-63-3 Guidelines for Digital Identity, for identity & credential service providers, was released on Thursday, March 22nd. It was both a pleasure and relief to see the final product after nine months of effort by a small band of dedicated volunteers in the Identity Assurance Working Group. Thanks again to ID.me for supplying editing resources. Stand by because we have new deliverables from other working groups poised for publication.   

There's more to come folks - much more.

Kind Regards,

Colin

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