During the video interview with OpenID evangelist Chris Messina I recorded earlier this year at a German conference about the state of OpenID, he expressed his wish that the Obama administration would soon start to embrace the decentralized, single sign-on method as a way for citizens to engage with the U.S. government online. Four months later, it looks like his dreams are becoming reality.
Later this morning at the Gov 2.0 Summit, Federal Government CIO Vivek Kundra will talk about data.gov and other governmental transparency initiatives, and will also be making an announcement regarding the launch of a open identity initiative featuring the use of both OpenID and InfoCards in a special pilot program.
Make no mistake about it: this has the potential to change the way citizens participate in and communicate with the U.S. government.
The OpenID Foundation has recently published a letter from executive director Don Thibeau as well as a fairly detailed white paper (PDF) on the subject of open frameworks for open governments that you might want to read for background. While the ‘Participating Providers in the U.S. Government Pilot Program’ section on the OpenID Foundation’s website hasn’t gone live yet, the Information Card Foundation provides more details about the pilot program on its blog.
Google, Yahoo, PayPal, AOL, VeriSign, Citi, Equifax, Acxiom, Privo and Wave Systems will be the ten organizations to act as digital identity providers using OpenID and Information Card technologies in the first pilot programs designed for the American public to engage in open government. Representatives from the companies had met with government IT officials early August to engage in talks about the initiative, which ReadWriteWeb caught wind of at the time.
The 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 said to be getting certification 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.
As an example, we have learned that VeriSign – a founding member of the OpenID Foundation – will serve as an identity provider for a pilot program with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), an agency of the US Department of Health and Human Services and regarded as one of the world’s foremost medical research centers as well as the Federal focal point for health research. Thanks to this implementation, citizens will be able to more easily provide input on public policy and access their own tax and Social Security records with OpenID:
In essence, this initiative will help transform government websites from basic “brochureware” into interactive resources, saving individuals time and increasing their direct involvement in governmental decision making. OpenID and Information Card technologies make such interactive access simple and safe. For example, in the coming months the NIH intends to use OpenID and Information Cards to support a number of services including customized library searches, access to training resources, registration for conferences, and use of medical research wikis, all with strong privacy protections.
Dr. Jack Jones, NIH CIO and Acting Director, CIT, notes, “As a world leader in science and research, NIH is pleased to participate in this next step for promoting collaboration among Assurance Level 1 applications. Initially, the NIH Single Sign-on service will accept credentials as part of an “Open For Testing” phase, with full production expected within the next several weeks. At that time, OpenID credentials will join those currently in use from InCommon, the higher education identity management federation, as external credentials trusted by NIH.”
Likely, we’ll learn more from Vivek Kundra’s scheduled speech at the Gov 2.0 Summit later today, but one thing is crystal clear: this is a big win for both the OpenID Foundation and the Information Card Foundation.
Who would have predicted say, 5 years ago, that you would some day be able to use commercial identities on government websites? Evidently, this raises questions about privacy and security but if these initiatives can garner enough public support, government validation of open identity frameworks could be a boon for the ecosystem of the open, distributed web. Plus, it can make dealing with the government a lot easier for you, too.
P.S.: also read Tim O’Reilly’s guest post on Gov 2.0 as a platform.
Firrrrsstttt:) Nice article
Now all they need is to create Android applications for people to interact with the Government, to manage society, to manage traffic, money transactions, healthcare, human resources, jobs, education, taxes, ID/passports, food distribution and quality control, cultural emancipation and diversity, crowd control, event management, public transportation, CO2 quotas management and so many other things. That if only the Government would make meaningful use of the new Android and Internet technologies, they could actually solve all the problems of the economy, pollution, education, jobs, everything solved all at once.
… and my laundry also needs picked up too.
Doing your laundry probably does pollute the environment, so definitely, why not have an interactive map over neighbors that are about to wash some whites, doing that will save you points on your CO2 quotas.
I hear the socialism train on it’s way to run us over…
You may have the wrong “ism” there.
Open ID being embraced by governments is good news for all of us as it means less headaches in creating individual user accounts just for commenting on sites and taking part in discussions.
I agree, I like the openID idea on a lot of websites
Does this mean liberal trolls will be limited to ONE account instead of THIRTY when they flood twitter, message boards, and sponsor “contact us” accounts to complain about Glenn Beck?
Now all they need is to create Android applications for people to interact with the Government, to manage society, to manage traffic, money transactions, healthcare, human resources, jobs, education, taxes, ID/passports, food distribution and quality control, cultural emancipation and diversity, crowd control, event management, public transportation, CO2 quotas management and so many other things. That if only the Government would make meaningful use of the new Android and Internet technologies, they could actually solve all the problems of the economy, pollution, education, jobs, everything solved all at once.
The addition of VeriSign to the mix will bring a lot more “trust” to this initiative. Now that they’ve been shedding the non-core lines like the recent sale to Syniverse they can get back to the business of “trust” in full measure [1].
[1] like, oh, say… putting DNSSEC into place for all those soon-to-be non-brochureware gov websites
I slowly see sites using a Facebook ID or a Twitter ID to sign in as against an Open ID
I have talked for years about this, at least now I don’t sound such a crackpot. The open concept will be the only way eventually. The entire planet can conceivably maintain a real time communication system beyond the bounds of modern language. Humans do not ‘need’ government just ability tp communicate. Politics are just old fashioned methods of communication. While the civil service side to government makes sense, the need for rulers and lords was outdated in the centuries prior.
Would you consider _1984_ open in that communication is omnipresent? Some of us Luddites actually enjoy that now passe word,
“privacy.”
Vivek Kundra — not sure how that guy has avoided jail so far, but will be interesting to see if/when the Federales come knocking again.
His mail order MIS degree is definitely sketch. Ditto the general tawdry nature of his rise — it’s all very Bush-esque.
Kundra reminds me of Auren Hoffman — the crook who runs Rapleaf. Back in the day, everyone, and I mean everyone, was Hoffman’s biggest fanboy. You couldn’t get through a single day’s posts without reading about how Hoffman was going to save us all from something or other. Then we find out he’s a two bit hack who is falsifying data on Wikipedia. Then we find out he’s Republican. Then it all starts to make sense.
All of that leads to Kundra’s consideration of OpenID as a technology that should be taken seriously. No competent technology person would dare get caught talking about OpenID, much less recommending its use. Of course, Kundra doesn’t have his position because he knows anything about technology — he’s got it because he knows how to take orders from very large computer corporations. I guess the joke is on me. And you.
Fascism in its ugliest form, I’ve got to agree. You can log into the Government websites, so long as you choose to store all your personal information with one of our favorite large corporations.
Oh, and those corporations don’t actually check that the information is accurate — that’s not part of the business model.
This is a bad joke.
OpenID concept is truly good. Really it would bring an interactive government, in other words it is the government run by people. But how far the communication will be trustworthy?
When there is a security, there exists a hacker to break it. The security and privacy policies are to be in exceptional mode to make this concept alive. I feel Biometrics integration in security policies will be more stronger.
And based on the professional politicians’ inability to handle “terrorist” senior citizens at Town Hall meetings during August, you seriously believe that the folks on the government end really give a damn about what any of us think? It’s a Brave New World.
Too bad that OpenID is still not secure. OpenID password gone -> all 200 linked accounts gone lol.
Great! This will lead to the RealID – so when Nazis ask ‘Where are you papers?” we can say “Sorry, do you take plastic?”
This is completely backwards.
I’m for privatization of as many functions of government as possible, but not when it comes to facilities that provide a safe environment for free commerce.
A critical role of government in a free commerce society is to vouch for each of the citizens’ ability to enter into legally binding contracts (ie, with birth, death, marriage, conservatorship, guardian and other basic certifications). Historically, those records were spread all over geographically and politically (at county, state and federal levels). So for the youngsters, make no mistake that there is a long and well thought out tradition of the government having this kind of information and making it freely available to anyone who wants it.
With the Internet boom, there are now a few, mainly Indian-owned, companies in America that are trying to sew all the various government databases together and cross reference them sometimes with phone numbers, but their allegiance to anything but Cash –and especially the Constitution is questionable, at best. (You should see the 60 Minutes interview with the CEO of InfoUSA.) It’s just entirely inappropriate to allow the county, state and federal offices to become nothing more than data-entry facilities for these multinationals.
No, it’s time for Congress to establish a small agency (capped budget) that operates a couple of SYBASE servers around the country to store the basic information about every citizen needed, mandate county, state and federal use of these repositories as “the” official records location for all the data needed to admit citizens to public schools, hospitals, jails, public office or to vouch for their ability to engage in free commerce, nothing more. This agency would also provide online-ids for login to any site (government or private) but would be prohibited by law from tracking such activity. Finally, the individual websites (like Google) relying on this service to confirm your identity and legal ability to enter into free commerce would receive a token that’s encrypted with their own subscriber-id, so that they can’t track you with your government’s id “by proxy” (only with their own site’s cookies, as they do now). A law would ban all county, state and other federal agencies from storing their own copies of the data in this central database –meaning that, for example, when someone is born or dies, the certificate is stored in this database (as opposed to this database containing a copy of something stored in another agency’s regional system creating “sync” problems).
I think it is a great idea because now I don’t have to wade through a mountain of data in order to aquire user names and log in’s.
Tomorrow, the White House CIO, Vivek Kundra, is going to announce his plans for cloud computing. It’s anticipated that this first phase he will announce at a press conference in California will give government agencies a central place to store and use simple collaboration tools. Kundra, who has acknowledged cloud computing’s place in the government’s IT tool box, agrees with many (including me) that it will cut costs.
But cloud computing, as is the truth with any IT tool, is only as good as its implementation. If Kundra really wants this first phase to be successful from a productivity and utilization point-of-view, he’ll have to include some other initiatives in his speech. Here are a few that I would deem essential (based on years of working with government agencies) if I found myself in his shoes:
1. Establish an automated way to enforce security compliance on government-provided mobile assets working outside an Agency’s LAN in the public cloud. Currently there is far too much reliance on human intervention for remote security enforcement.
2. Provide a centralized management platform that provides both visibility and control over government assets operating in the public cloud. This will provide peace of mind and real-time reportability as to the compliance status of devices that are less and less frequently connected to an Agency’s network.
3. Streamline FISMA standards to allow greater flexibility amongst Government Agencies to implement technologies that meet their specific operational needs and that facilitate the participation of more leading edge technology vendors.
4. Increase teleworking goals across all Government Agencies to continue the “greening” of Washington, DC and attract more “Millennial” workers to the federal workforce.
5. Increase the awareness of IT managers across the Federal Government that the public cloud CAN be leveraged securely to meet teleworking and COOP goals.
For any TechCrunch readers looking to facilitate registrations, simplify logins, and create better user experiences, check out the OpenID deployment information at the OpenID Foundation website: http://bit.ly/jIOIv