Posts Tagged ‘Foundation’
Posted at 1:58 am on February 20, 2009 by Chris Messina
The OpenID Foundation is happy to introduce Don Thibeau as our new executive director. Don is taking over from Bill Washburn who helped get the Foundation off the ground.
Even with the substantial momentum that OpenID has gained already in 2009, Don has his work cut out for him beyond our two main priorities of improving user experience and security along with increasing our outreach to and engagement of website operators and end users. To get a sense for his priorities and anticipated plans for the Foundation, I asked him some introductory questions:
- Q: How did you first learn about OpenID and what interests you in the technology?
A: I have been working with web transactions, privacy policy and identity validation for a while now. So I’ve been watching OpenID from the sidelines. I’ve wanted to take a deeper dive in how social networks overlays those issues. The Foundation is at the intersection of those issues and more. There’s no better place to be.
- Q: What challenges do you think OpenID faces that it must confront in 2009?
A: First and always, continue to balance the interests and be responsive to all stakeholders, community members, and corporate sponsors, etc.
Second, to deal effectively with success. That means to make sure the Foundation can responsibly sustain and accelerate the momentum now underway.
- Q: What technologies or services suggest where you think the web will go over the next several years?
A: I know we at the beginning of the era of social networking. But I’m not smart enough to know where the web will go. That’s one of the things I like about this space.
I do know the OpenID can be a “Front Door” for the web experience for people, for users, for members across the board.
- Q: What experience do you have that you intend to bring to the OIDF?
A: I have a career-long interest in identity authentication and a personal passion for protecting individual privacy. It is a painful irony that is seems our physical identity is more protected than our digital identities.
I come from the content creation and online transactions world. I have the benefit of learning from naive and failed attempts at walled gardens — proprietary plays and the like. So collaboration is more than a mantra: it’s the only way this work gets done on a corporate, community and personal level.
- Q: As ED, what will be your top three priorities?
A: My short-term priorities are to build a foundation for growth. It’s not sexy but “plumbing” is important. So my immediate focus will be on making sure the Foundations’ finances and governance issues are solid. The third priority is to begin planning for a major OIDF event later in the year.
- Q: What are you most looking forward to with regards to OpenID in 2009?
A: I am blown away by with the level of engagement from all stakeholders. The make-up of the new board reflects how articulate, diverse and committed the community is. A physics professor of mine pointed out the high correlation between passion and success. The OIDF seems to have both in abundance.
If you’d like to reach out to Don and welcome him, you can contact him via email at don@oidf.org or leave a comment right here.
Tags: Foundation
This entry was posted
on Friday, February 20th, 2009 at 1:58 am and is filed under Foundation, News.
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Posted at 11:30 pm on February 5, 2009 by David Recordon
Today we’re excited to join Facebook’s Mike Schroepfer in announcing that they have joined the OpenID Foundation’s board as a sustaining corporate member.
Luke Shepard, a key member of Facebook’s Platform and Connect teams and a huge internal advocate for OpenID, has been selected as their representative and joins the current board of seven community elected board members and six sustaining corporate members: Google, IBM, Microsoft, PayPal (joined last week), VeriSign and Yahoo!. Additionally, to maintain the ratio of community and corporate board members, Joseph Smarr will be joining the board as our eighth community member.
As the OpenID community entered 2009 two key topics have become the focal points on the road to mainstream adoption: user experience and security.
Given the popularity and positive user experience of Facebook Connect, we look forward to Facebook working within the community to improve OpenID’s usability and reach. As a first step, Facebook will be hosting a design summit next week at their campus in Palo Alto which follows a similar summit on user experience hosted at Yahoo! last year. The summit will convene some of the top designers from Facebook, the DiSo Project, Google, JanRain, MySpace, Six Apart and Yahoo!, focusing on how existing OpenID implementations could support an experience similar to Facebook Connect.
Facebook’s financial contribution along with its membership on the board signals the company’s enthusiasm to work more closely with the OpenID community, building up momentum towards their adoption of OpenID as a standard. Facebook furthering its commitment to openness couldn’t have come at a better time to make 2009 an amazing year for OpenID and the wider social web.
For press contacts, please call OpenID Foundation board members David Recordon at 503.341.3009 or Chris Messina at 412.225.1051.
Tags: facebook, Foundation, usability, user experience
This entry was posted
on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 11:30 pm and is filed under Foundation, News.
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Posted at 4:00 pm on January 28, 2009 by Brian Kissel
Building on the momentum from last year, the OpenID Foundation is pleased to announce the addition of PayPal as a sustaining corporate member of the Board. PayPal selected Andrew Nash, Sr. Director of Information Risk Management and a longstanding advocate for OpenID, as their representative and joins the current board of seven community elected board members and five sustaining corporate members: Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo!. According to Andrew, PayPal decided to become a sustaining member of the Foundation for a few key reasons:
- Open standards-based user-centric identity is clearly becoming an increasingly important part of the evolving web infrastructure
- PayPal has significant experience and expertise with security, trust, reputation and retail transactions that can be directly relevant as OpenID expands into new market and application areas
Executive committee announced
Following the community board member elections in December, the Board elected its Executive Committee (EC) at the first OpenID Foundation Board meeting of 2009 (minutes). The EC which works with the executive director on day to day operations and governance of the Foundation.
The following members were selected to the EC for 2009:
- Chair – Brian Kissel (JanRain)
- Vice-Chair – Scott Kveton (Vidoop) who was previously Chair
- Secretary – Mike Jones (Microsoft)
- Treasurer – Raj Mata (Yahoo!)
- Committee Liaison – David Recordon (Six Apart) who was previously Vice-Chair
The election of the EC was by unanimous consent on a full slate of officers, as discussed and determined by all the board members. The full Board meets every six weeks and the EC meets every two. In addition, in affirmation of the global nature of OpenID, the Board recently voted to add an International Liaison to the EC and will select that member shortly.
Board members featured on ReadWriteTalk
Last week, four Board members joined Sean Ammirati and others from popular technology blog ReadWriteWeb for an hour long podcast about increasing overall OpenID adoption, future plans for the OpenID Foundation and our thoughts on Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect. The interview has been published on ReadWriteTalk.
Once again, we look forward to continuing our progress in 2009 and continue to welcome the input and contributions of the entire community.
Tags: Foundation, paypal, presss
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 4:00 pm and is filed under News.
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