The OpenID Foundation has covered a lot of ground in the last 1.5 years since its inception. We consolidated a number of internet identity efforts, built an organization charged with promoting and protecting the efforts of this fantastic community, developed an Intellectual Property Process that will ensure OpenID stays open, brought a number of the major vendors as participants in the community. and are seeing the first signs of deployment.

Bill Washburn has been the Executive Director of the OpenID Foundation since January 2007 and was instrumental in all these achievements. BIll took a leap of faith during the formation of the Foundation, working tirelessly on the promise that it we would succeed. Bill’s skills as a mediator and his passion for the Foundation’s mission made the impossible possible. In short, without Bill, the OpenID Foundation would not exist. We, as a community, owe a huge debt of gratitude to him for all of the work that he has done.

As is true with any growing organization, a time comes when a different set of skills are needed as the organization moves from one phase to another. That time has come for the Foundation. The Foundation now needs a more operationally focused Executive Director to deliver on the Foundation’s new needs. Bill Washburn will remain on to help with the recruiting and transition. If you think you have the right stuff for the OpenID Foundation, please drop us a line at board@openid.net.

The folks over at JanRain have launched demand.openid.net. This is a great little tool that will help users tell the sites they like how much they really want OpenID. It comes complete with a handy-dandy bookmarklet you install in your browser to quickly tell the world about the sites you want OpenID enabled. Great work JanRain folks!

Already have some coverage on it already:

• Demand.OpenID.net: A One Click Call to Action
• Crowdsourcing the Demand for OpenID!

Last week SourceForge quietly added support for OpenID to their site. The news is official now.

SourceForge implemented relying party support (as opposed to just being a provider) which is a trend not often seen by larger players. I wanted to talk with one of their developers to see what it took to make this all happen, especially in a large organization like SourceForge. I spoke with Luke Crouch who was the lead developer on the project.

In this podcast I try to cover some of the questions that large sites have to consider when adopting OpenID as well as ask a bit about the future for open technologies at SourceForge. Hope you enjoy it.

If you use open source software then you’ve probably heard about SourceForge before.  If you develop open source software then you’ve probably even used some of their infrastructure in the past.  Today they’ve made it even easier to login to SourceForge with OpenID.  SourgeForge.net isn’t acting as an OpenID Provider but rather is accepting OpenID logins; this is a good thing and reinforces the trend of sites like Ma.gnolia only accepting OpenID logins.

In their announcement OpenID on SourceForge.net they say, “OpenID is getting tremendous traction and we’re happy to be jumping into it. it’s bringing us back in touch with fresh web (2.0) technology. as a decentralized open-source standard, it’s a perfect fit for us – it allows us to streamline more user interaction and participation with our site, and hopefully more for the whole OSS community.”  As Steven Osborn points out, SourceForge.net is now one of the most prominent single sites that accepts OpenID to login.  Steven also goes on to talk about some of the more advanced things SourceForge allows you to do with your OpenID if you do wish to use your profile URL as an OpenID too.

Congratulations SourceForge for continuing to help get OpenID in the hands of open source developers on a daily basis!