2018: November

Owned by Colin Wallis (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Dec 04, 2018

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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Hello everyone

I do hope our North American members and participants had an enjoyable and peaceful Thanksgiving.

We are into the final stretch! It's hard to believe we are at the year's end and this will be the last Director's Corner that you might see from me before the New Year. I guess it depends on how diligent I am on December 31st...(wink). 

November brought Kantara's official speaking engagements to a close for the year, tho' we are aware that our members continue to sponsor events right through to the end of the year.

Kantara is deep into 2019 planning mode with discussions underway with conference organizers and the Leadership Council discussing the composition of the Work Groups and their deliverables including, for any resulting resource gaps, locating sources of funding.

As reported last time, Kantara started the month in Brussels with the ISSE conference in concert with our key European Liaison EEMA. We hosted the Kantara hour that started with Mark Lizar (Open Consent Group) who presented "Operationalizing privacy, with security & surveillance". He was followed by Oscar Santolalla (Ubisecure) who demonstrated the Kantara Consent Receipt in action. To wrap it up, I presented another rendition of 'The rhythm of Kantara'.  We had a pretty full room and a very engaged audience who, through their questions and discussions, caused us to run over our time allocation. https://twitter.com/osantolalla did some great follow ups.    

Kantara staff worked quickly to launch the ID Proofing and Verification Discussion Group. This Group will collect Identity Proofing and Verification Use Cases from industry that will be contributed to ISO SC27 Working Group 5 Identity Management and Privacy. This Group has received fantastic interest, despite it's promotion only being days old. Thank you vendors and experts for expressing your intention to participate. 

While on the topic of liaisons and Kantara's involvement with international committees, the twice yearly OECD meetings in our domain met in Paris where Kantara's engagement is via ITAC. I was unable to attend in person but was able to follow proceedings remotely the following week. These meetings cover future policy formation for Government in the domains of digital identity, privacy, AI, IoT and more generally the direction of the digital economy.  Kantara members in good standing can read the outcomes of the OECD meetings or contribute more generally to Identity Management and Privacy standardization in SC27 WG5 if they join Kantara's Board sub-committee. 

The final conference of the month was the Think.Digital Identity conference in London last Thursday. While this event is primarily targeted at the public sector, it offers interesting insights into the current state of digital identity in the UK. Kantara was a media partner for the event and Kantara members ForgeRock and Ubisecure supported the conference with sponsorship. Both members enjoyed podium time on panels as did Kantara.  The highlight of this conference for me was seeing around 70% of the audience raise their hands in response to my question "Who has heard of Kantara?" It was a tribute to UK members, participants and Marketing's efforts on social media that Kantara's different ethos, open community and artefacts were so well known in this challenging market.

The month ended with a Tweet to officially announce success for Kantara Initiative, Europe in a consortium together with members and friends for a European H2020 grant funding project called NGI_TRUST . This is a perfect fit for the Kantara community of experts innovators and visionaries working on privacy and trust enhancing technologies for the Next Generation Internet. Look out for the first call for proposals in February 2019.

Look past December and into January 2019, I will be in Washington DC supporting our KIPI Program partners at the DHS S&T Cybersecurity and Innovation Showcase  for the week commencing January 7th and available for meetings with you or your colleagues in the DC area. Please just Contact us to reserve a meeting time.     

The All Member Ballot for the revised Operating Procedures passed a few days before the close, which is great to see. Thank you again for your support of Kantara, even in these less stimulating administrative areas.  

It is with great pleasure that we welcome new individual member Silvia Knittl from Europe.

We also announce and thank a clutch of renewing members from the Trust Framework Operations & Assurance Program including:

  • ID.me, Kantara's first service provider carrying the Kantara NIST 800-63-3 conformity assessment Trust Mark at IAL2 and AAL2, while still also retaining its NIST 800-63-2 Mark
  • Verizon Synchronoss partner Zentry including renewal of the Trust Mark for its service; and
  •  USPS. 

Finally, Kantara Accredited Assessor Kuma.pro, renewed for a further 12 months. Thank you KUMA!

I won't have many more opportunities this year to say a great big THANK YOU for your support this past year and, on behalf of the incredibly dedicated Kantara staff team, we look forward to serving your interests again in 2019.

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!