WRITTEN ON September 9th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Foundation of Trust, Identity, We told you so..., What do we want?

Pleased to be able to report the dogs b*llocks of ID announcements:

Washington, D.C. – September 9, 2009 – Ten industry leaders – Yahoo!, PayPal, Google, Equifax, AOL, VeriSign, Acxiom, Citi, Privo and Wave Systems – announced today they will support the first pilot programs designed for the American public to engage in open government – government that is transparent, participatory, and collaborative. This open identity initiative is a key step in President Obama’s memorandum to make it easy for individuals to register and participate in government websites – without having to create new usernames and passwords. Additionally, members of the public will be able to fully control how much or how little personal information they share with the government at all times.

These companies will act as digital identity providers using OpenID and Information Card technologies. The pilot programs are being conducted by the Center for Information Technology (CIT), National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and related agencies. The participating companies are being certified under non-discriminatory open trust frameworks developed under collaboration between the OpenID Foundation (OIDF) and the Information Card Foundation (ICF) and reviewed by the federal government.

This is great news, because it opens the way to a healthy ecosystem of third-party identity providers for the full range of different purposes for different services. It underpins, with the whole weight of the US government as user, the emerging (and hitherto largely theoretical) person-centric model of identity management. The user-centric model is placed on an equal footing with the organisation-centric model. Identities can be managed and personal data and servies integrated by the user, under the user’s control.

HMG take note. Did Intellect, EDS, Atos, QinetiQ, IBM, Fujitsu etc tell you this was coming? Did the Caninet Office, Home Office/IPS, DTI Foresight, CESG, James Crosby? If you’d thought to ask Bob at the Burton Group, he might have. Or, of course, Ctrl-Shift which researches and advises on this stuff. For more news and developments on this general themefollow Ctrl-Shift on Twitter.

Governments that go down this route could eventually provide personalised services. Now that would be interesting. And they could do it without compromising privacy. Viva Obama! Wake up, Whitehall.