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.

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!

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!

“… 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.“

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.

Earlier today in Tokyo, the OpenID Foundation along with eleven technology companies in Japan announced the formation of a Japanese chapter of the OpenID Foundation. Just as the OpenID Foundation’s board is made up of some of the top Internet companies around the World, these initial participants in this local chapter are some of the top technology and are the premier social networking services in Japan. The OpenID Foundation works to support the community all around the World and is encouraging the formation of local chapters to work within their own communities, supporting the Foundation’s mission of fostering and promoting the development and adoption of OpenID on the Internet.

In addition to taking part in the Japan chapter, Mixi announced that they will be shipping support for OpenID shortly. The joint Japanese press release garnered enough attention to be featured on the front page of Google News in Japan and the introduction is translated below:

Six Apart KK (Headquarters: Minato-ku, Tokyo, Executive Vice President of U.S. Six Apart, Ltd.& General Manager of Japan: Nobuhiro Seki), VeriSign Japan K.K. (Headquarters: Chuo-ku, Tokyo, President & CEO: Teruhide Hashimoto) and Nomura Research Institute, Ltd. (Headquarters: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, President, CEO&COO: Akihisa Fujinuma) announced today that the three companies will jointly establish “OpenID Foundation, Japan Chapter (tentative name)” in order to further popularize OpenID technologies in Japan.

OpenID Foundation, Japan Chapter will be established in April as Japan’s branch office of the U.S.’s OpenID Foundation under permission of the U.S. parent organization. The three companies, founders of OpenID Foundation, Japan Chapter, have held discussions with the U.S.’s OpenID Foundation aimed at establishing the foundation in order to vigorously accelerate popularization of OpenID technologies in Japan. Companies Ascent Networks, E-context, Infoteria, Livedoor, mixi, Nifty, Technorati Japan, and Yahoo! Japan will also participate in OpenID Foundation, Japan Chapter primarily to support implementation and popularization of OpenID technologies for consumers in Japan.

David Recordon (Vice-Chair of the OpenID Foundation) and Nat Sakimura (of NRI) spoke this morning in Tokyo and their presentation can be found online. If you’re already building an OpenID community and wish to start a local chapter of the Foundation, you can learn more at http://openid.net/foundation/chapters/.

Last year, OpenID grew by leaps and bounds both as a technology and as a community. At the beginning of 2006, there were fewer than 20-million OpenID enabled URLs and less than 500 websites where they could be used. Today there are over a quarter of a billion OpenIDs and well over 10,000 websites to accept them. OpenID has grown to be implemented by major open source projects such as Drupal, cornerstone Web 2.0 services such as those by 37signals and Six Apart, as well as a mix of large companies including as Apple, Google, and Yahoo!. Today is about truly recognizing the accomplishments of the entire OpenID community which has certainly grown beyond the small grassroots community where it started in late 2005.

So what does this really mean? In the past few months respected bloggers, analysts, and marketers have been writing about how OpenID needs to start being explained clearly, so that it can actually become a mainstream technology. We started this process late last year by cleaning up the website, making it far more accessible and useful to a wider range of people. At OpenID DevCamp there was a focus on OpenID usability and the implementation of Yahoo! OpenID Provider clearly shows that a lot of thought went into making it clear and comprehensible to those who aren’t geeks.

One of the other accomplishments of the Foundation last year was working with AOL, Microsoft, VeriSign, Sun, Symantec, and Yahoo! to develop an intellectual property rights policy and process for technical OpenID specification work which was finalized in December. While all of these community accomplishments have been great, each was made possible by the community’s willingness to include the resources of companies alongside the efforts of individual contributors.

By bringing on these companies and their resources, the OpenID Foundation will now be able to better serve the needs of  the entire OpenID community. In 2008, we can expect to see a larger focus on making OpenID even more accessible to a mainstream audience, the development of a World-wide trademark usage policy (much like the Jabber Foundation and Mozilla have done), and a larger international focus on working with the OpenID communities in Asia and Europe. Awesome!

Much was done … here is just a sampling:

• Brad Fitzpatrick, Ryan Barrett, and Sam Alexander wrote a new semi-automated test suite for OpenID relying parties and providers. More information can be found at the Google Code OpenID-test project page.
• Discussions of OpenID + OAuth and how they can seamlessly complement each other.  David Recordon and Joseph Smarr started to document this OpenID Extension which builds atop OpenID Attribute Exchange.
• A good group discussion about the possibilities around what we can land at OpenID end-points. (see Scott’s post on this). Consensus is that we’ve got the pieces and now its time to crank out some code.
• Joseph Smarr upgraded Plaxo to be an OpenID 2.0 relying party and debugged their support of i-names. (woohoo!)
• Christopher Allen helped to clean up the OpenID wiki and refreshed the page on setting up delegation.
• Evan Prodromou updated his OpenID plugin for MediaWiki to support 2.0 as a remote participant!
• Eugene Eric Kim and Matthew have a Perl XRI implementation (almost) done.
• Chris Messina talked about the DiSo project with its possibilities around XMPP and discovery.
• Randy Reddig continued his work from a few days ago on updating the OpenID logo especially to work better in small sizes as another remote participant.
• Chris Messina led a discussion on OpenID usability where we worked on developing relying party best practices around login interfaces and error messages.

Additionally, getting an entire group of OpenID veterans was a great way for people to debug their problems and learn new things:

• A few people got their Ruby on Rails blogs OpenID enabled for commenting.
• Getting the Java version of consumer library installed and figuring out what it takes to be a provider (hint: acting as a great provider is hard).
• Zentu now lets you login using OpenID!

Some takeaways and things the group would like to try to accomplish for next time:

• Translate vCard attributes to Attribute Exchange schema end-points.

Planning and organizing OpenIDDevCamp really wasn’t that hard so if you’ve ever thought about putting together an event like this, you really should!  Feel free to use this event’s wiki page as a template.

Attendees will include web designers, developers and testers all working together over the weekend to enable OpenID on their sites or just learn more about this technology. Bonus points go to folks who can help make OpenID more accessible to general users. Development projects will include both solo and team efforts. While some attendees will wish to work solo during the event, we encourage attendees to team up, based on expertise, to work in ad-hoc project development teams. All attendees should be prepared to work on a development project during the event.

If you’re already in San Francisco or will be coming into town for MacWorld, want to learn more about OpenID, you should definitely drop by.  Please RSVP for OpenIDDevCamp on Upcoming.  Maybe you’ll even find out from Yahoo! what is going on with OpenID tags on Flickr?

The gist of this means that we have a process in place that will help the OpenID community to continue to thrive in its efforts. The intellectual property policy helps define how and who can contribute to the project as well as laying out ways to protect those that use the technology.

Huge thanks go out to everyone involved (in no particular order): David Recordon, Bill Washburn, Mike Jones, Kim Cameron, David Daggett, Dick Hardt, Johannes Ernst, Gabe Wachob, Drummond Reed, Martin Atkins and Artur Bergman. There are others I’m sure and I apologize profusely for missing you. We couldn’t have done this without everybody getting behind this effort and I’m really excited what this means for broader adoption of OpenID in 2008.