2019: May

Owned by Colin Wallis (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Jun 04, 2019 by Ken Dagg (Unlicensed)
5 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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To no surprise to most, May continued in the same vein as April - just so busy. The conference season crescendo is in June and I write this from Washington DC on the first of six speaking engagements I have for Kantara in the US, UK and Europe in the next 27 days, as well as for others in Canada and elsewhere.    

In further support of Kantara's Trust Framework Operations program and its NIST 800-63-3 Rev 3 Class of Approval, the US federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) published its much awaited policy on identity credential and access management.  It lays out the US federal government's expectations of agencies in this regard and the role of various stakeholders, with a strong emphasis on 63-3. As the Leadership Council chair observed, our 800-63-3 Rev 3 Class of Approval under the Identity Assurance Framework tangibly demonstrates Kantara's alignment - that *this* is the scarce resource that only Kantara can offer. In addition, the new memo makes it far easier to make the connection to a purchasing department requirement - both are the magic ingredients to selling approvals. The month did not end there for the Identity Assurance Working Group (IAWG) as it was busy providing comments back to DIACC on its Pan-Canadian Trust Framework.

Conference-wise, as I said at the beginning, May began where April left off, finding us at the Connect:ID conference in Washington DC which I talked about in last month's Director's Corner.  I presented 'Build Customer Confidence with Assurance Trust Marks' there making the case for the IDESG logo to be re-crafted as a consumer Trust Mark. It's not only the Mark that is getting some interest however. There is also some interest from another non-profit entity in leveraging the features and functionality of the self attesting Registry that was used for service providers self attesting conformance to the IDentity Ecosystem Framework. It's early days and will be a slow burn, but nonetheless promising for those artifacts safely located in the Kantara Educational Foundation.. 

After a week off we were into the European Members Plenary near Munich on Monday May 13th. This event curtain-raises the Kantara pre-conference workshop at the European Identity Conference the following day. We had 15 attend the plenary and around 30 or so attend the pre-conference workshop - lighter than in previous years perhaps due to a blockchain session taking place in the next room. Folks are naturally attracted to the new shiny thing but only later realize that it is existing ideas reprised in new architecture where much of the existing operational functionality and feature-sets still has to be incorporated.

Now we are preparing June's events too. We start with our newest liaison partner CARIN Alliance's Summit in DC that I am speaking at. This is followed by Identity North in Toronto where Leadership Council Chair Andrew hughes will be leading sessions in Day 2 unconference.  At the end of this week is Think Digital Identity in the UK, followed the next week by Identity Week in the UK, followed by EEMA in the UK and Whitehall Media IDM in the UK the week after. Finally, in the last week of June, we are back in Washington DC for Identiverse. I am 'circling the wagons' right now for our Masterclass which features, the Consent and Information sharing work group's consent receipt demo, ID.me's Blake Hall and AllclearID's Catherine Schulten talking about the lastest policy releases positively impacting Kantara's assurance program, the User Manager Access (UMA) working group having presentations from MIT's Thomas Hardjono, Tim Reiniger together with Canadian UMA deployer Identos's Mike Cook, plus a cameo appearance from Ian Glazer on ID Pro. Please give these folks your full support.     

Mittetulundusühing Kantara Initiative Europe is deep into reviewing the 38 proposals it was allocated from the 109 received for the first call for proposals in the NGI_Trust project. 

As mentioned last month, we continue to hire more staff to keep up with the interest in Kantara, with Chris Healy becoming our first 'Kantara ambassador'. Chris is charged with developing Kantara's ethos and membership in the Washington DC area. Chris is on the Staff list so just Contact us if he can help in any way.

Remember to take a look at our 10th Anniversary Infographic and celebration video here, straight off the homepage of the website. There will be virtual cake cutting and actual cake cutting on or near the day.   

Please join me in welcoming new member One.Thing.less  

On the community side of the house:

  • the Consent & Information Sharing WG (CISWG) is gathering contributions for the first draft of Consent Receipt v2.0 and collaborating with members on the Consent Receipt Generator and developing the demo with its requisite privacy dashboard. It is also gathering contributions on the DIACC's (the Digital Identification and Authentication Council of Canada) document out related to Notice and Consent https://diacc.ca/2019/04/03/notice-consent-overview-conformance-discussion-drafts/ as a component of the Pan-Canadian Trust Framework to set a baseline of public and private sector interoperability of identity services and solutions.  If you want to contribute you must join the CIS working group (no charge)
  • the UMA WG is maturing its business - legal framework model and preparing presentations for Identiverse as well as the 105th IETF meeting in Canada. Interoperability testing is increasingly needed so if you can help, please let us know.  
  • the Identity Assurance Work Group (IAWG) has released a refreshed Overview and Glossary for the Identity Assurance Framework (IAF) for public review and comment and invites them all.  

I'm looking forward to a break in summer for sure, but let the good times keep rolling right through till the Fall and beyond.

Keep well, keep hustling and keep championing Kantara's ethics, ethos and services to the industry and community we serve - YOU!

Kind Regards,

Colin

Around the Houses:

Marketing:

Program, Work Group and Discussion Group Updates:

  • You can always keep up with the latest news from the Work and Discussion Groups directly on the Leadership Council's Blog. See the list of public groups here.

  • As always, our Specifications, Recommendations and Reports are available for download from our Reports and Recommendations web repository - now with frictionless access.  

Events: See them all here!