What better way to spend Cinco de Mayo then with a bunch of your favorite OpenID community members learning more about OpenID? :-)

Sun has offered to host an OpenIDDevCamp at their annual day-long CommunityOne developer conference the day before the start of JavaOne. Not only will you get a chance to talk with OpenID developers you’ll also get to interact with members of other open source communities (such as Drupal and Ruby on Rails). Vidoop’s Michael Richardson is going to be helping lead the efforts with the help of other community members.

Monday May 5, 2008 – 11am – 8pm
Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA

We’ll be in Hall A and we’ll have tables, white boards and wifi. We’ll get things started at 11am and will run until 8pm. The CommunityOne reception will be in that hall from 6 – 8pm (read: free as in beer).

Please register for the event. In the “referral code” field, put in “OpenID”. That will get you in the door. General session is from 9:30am – 10:45am (see the website for more details).

Once signed up, you’ll receive the SWAG bag, lunch and be able to participate in the reception. Not only do you get access to CommunityOne but you get a free pass for Day 1 at JavaOne. CommuntiyOne is a free event.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

This week (April 22, 2008) the BBC Internet Blog informed readers it has become a member of the OpenID Foundation. Naturally this is exciting news and another indication of how OpenID has the clear potential and momentum to provide great value to users everywhere around the globe. BBC is one of, if not indeed, the single most trusted and internationally esteemed news organizations serving the public around the world today.

“… People have been speculating about the BBC’s attitude towards OpenID for a while. And getting identity right is key to our future plans and with that in mind we are looking very seriously at how the increasing number of data portability technologies could and should work for the BBC.

OpenID, being a shared identity service, is part of that mix and is already starting to gain adoption amongst leading technology companies and the BBC is (I think!) the first large media company to join the likes of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and IBM in the foundation. This means that we can share our future plans, show support and contribute to existing OpenID technical and marketing work groups.“

Last week PopSugar and TechCrunch hosted a party in Los Angeles and managed to raise an incredible $13,250 to donate to to charity which they’ve graciously decided to split evenly between the DataPortability.org working group and the OpenID Foundation. We’re thrilled by their continuing support of the OpenID community and will use this money to continue furthering OpenID adoption and education around the World.

Already over the past year the Foundation has helped to establish an intellectual property policy to ensure that all OpenID specifications remain free to implement, got OpenID 2.0 out the door, hosted an OpenID DevCamp in San Francisco, co-sponsored the Social Graph FooCamp, grew the board to include Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo!, and started work to form local chapters of the Foundation.

Thanks to this incredibly generous donation, this year you’ll continue to see the Foundation fostering development communities around the World and pushing forward specifications, best practices and increasing general education around OpenID.

We can’t thank TechCrunch enough for supporting us.