The OpenID Foundation has announced nominations and upcoming elections for six open community board seats.
This year marks the Foundation’s second election; last year, Snorri Giorgetti, Nat Sakimura, Chris Messina, David Recordon, Eric Sachs, Scott Kveton and Brian Kissel were elected. Of the current community board members, Messina and Sakimura were elected to two-year terms. Kveton has indicated he will not serve another term.
Individuals who are passionate about OpenID and digital identity, regardless of professional affiliations, are welcome as candidates. The election process, beginning with nominations, will begin Monday, November 23. The process is detailed in this PDF. Nominations and voting are open to all Foundation members, and membership for individuals starts at $25. Nominations will close on December 7, and voting will end December 23.
In a blog post today, executive director Don Thibeau wrote that he envisions changes for how the board and the Foundation will operate in the coming year.
“Organizations that have transitioned from specification development to market adoption (the space we entered this year) have evolved their governance and membership programs to meet operational and financial objectives. In order to improve the core technology product, drive RP adoption, and increase member services, we need to find ways to offer more membership value and create diversified sources of income.
“2010’s board members will consider how best to balance competing priorities with still unfolding value in the trust framework and certification work to do with the U.S. government and others. We’ve been told by experts that demand for certification is a leading indicator of the growth and maturity of a technology standard. How we do certification will, in part, shape our future.”
As distributed social networking continues to grow and shape the Web we use, issues such as creating secure, portable digital identities become more and more intrinsic to making the Internet work for users, sites and content creators. Thibeau concluded, “For myself, I believe an open, reliable, trusted identity standard can be the next key operational piece of Internet infrastructure. It can be to the identity layer what DNS is to the Web layer and IP is to the packet layer.”
Indeed, the past year has brought lots of publicity and material advances to the Foundation’s cause. At the beginning of 2009, we reported that Google and Plaxo had created a simplified workflow for OpenID logins that added OAuth and the Google Contacts API. During the OpenID UX Summit in February, we wrote that one Comcast property reported a 92% success rate with OpenID logins. Perhaps most exciting of all was this May’s news that Facebook would be allowing users to log in using OpenID. But no nod of approval carried more weight than the recent decision of the US government to allow members of the public to use OpenID to log in to certain government websites.
We look forward to reporting more good things – including nomination and election results – from the Foundation in the months to come.
