Wouldn’t it be nice if Personal Digital Identity technologies like LID and OpenID were interoperable? This morning, the nice folks at Six Apart and we at NetMesh announced YADIS.org, a new project to make Personal Digital Identity technologies interoperable.

It all started when Brad Fitzpatrick (the founder of LiveJournal and inventor of OpenID), David Recordon (of LiveJournal/Six Apart, and implementor of OpenID) and myself (NetMesh, creator of LID) got together a few months ago to hash out a way that would allow owners of OpenIDs to use them at LID sites, and owners of LID URLs to use them at OpenID sites. We felt strongly that everybody’s rhetoric of "identity technologies should interoperate" should be followed by action, and so we stuck our heads together to make it so, at least for OpenID and LID, because both projects are committed to this goal and are architecturally quite similar.

But by solving that problem — which required some tricks but wasn’t too hard — we realized that we also solved a larger problem: almost by accident, we created an interoperability architecture for personal digital identities, into which not just LID and OpenID can plug, but many others can, too. (Various conversations that we’ve had with members of other projects so far have confirmed that.) All of this is very light-weight and can be implemented in virtually any programming environment (e.g. LAMP, Java, .NET …) because it does not require a SOAP or WS-* stack, complicated tools, or substantial new software. The essence of it is a, again very simple, capability discovery protocol, by which software can figure out what a particular identity can do, and then talk to it appropriately. We also agreed on how to do profile data exchange.

So far, the YADIS spec has been reviewed about a dozen or so people ("friends and family") and as of today, we invite public feedback through the wiki at yadis.org. Implementations are in progress but for my part, I’m really looking forward to public comments before "freezing" the initial YADIS spec and releasing code that officially supports it. (Code supporting the capability query is already available here and mylid.net also supports it as of this morning)

The most exciting thing, for me, beyond LID and OpenID becoming interoperable, is that the YADIS architecture allows lots of people to innovate within a framework that breaks the digital identity problem into modules. Prior to YADIS, if you had a great idea for, say, more secure single-sign-on, you had to develop your entire digital identity stack and compete, stack by stack, with LID, OpenID, Sxip, XDI/XRI/i-names, and who knows what else. Now, with YADIS, you can focus on what your idea is about, and offer your idea as a module into the YADIS framework. No more need to boil the ocean, but an avenue to innovate without breaking interoperability. We absolutely want people to be involved, and innovate! You need no consent from anybody to plug into YADIS, but we give you the capabilities to do so. (I will have some more to say later on the unusual kind of "standard" YADIS is — one that encourages innovation, instead of locking everything down as most standards do.)

We do all of this because we are convinced that we are only at the beginning of seeing the potential and impact of Personal Digital Identity technologies, and thus it is the time of innovation, not lock-down; I think YADIS is an excellent catalyst for accelerating innovation from the entire community, and deliver on the promise of Web 2.0, the participation age, or personal network computing (whichever your favorite term).

I’m looking forward to your feedback!

Turns out Kim was busy getting himself to safety from hurricane Wilma, which most certainly is a much more important activity than responding to mailing list or blog comments. Now that he is back, he’s very clear on his views about “Who owns the [identity] metasystem”:

So let me provide some definitive and public answers that represent my thinking as Microsoft’s Architect of Identity … and which Mike Jones, Andy Harjanto, John Shewchuk, and all the rest of us from identity land at Microsoft see as self-evident:

No one can own the identity metasystem - that would be a silly goal by any standards.

…As for the passage Johannes quotes, it is not our intended message. We’ve talked about Microsoft’s Vision for an Identity Metasystem, but never implied we “owned” the system.

Apparently my “over-zealous copywriter” theory was correct, and the problem has been corrected for the conference in question. But this also illuminates the uphill battle for “us from identity land at Microsoft”: everybody, the copywriters just as me and so many others who have commented to me privately, is just very wary of, and immediately willing to believe in gaps between public statements of the good people at Microsoft, like Kim, and actual actions of the corporate entity on the ground. You gotta admire Kim and his fellow change agents at Microsoft, because it’s most certainly about the hardest place in this industry from where to launch an open, participatory system of any kind …

Update Oct 22: Kim responds: "We do our part to build the metasystem - others do theirs. The metasystem belongs to no one - and to everyone… As for the quote below, I have no idea who wrote it. I really doubt it would be any sentient being from Microsoft. Certainly it’s not our intended message." I appreciate your clarification, Kim! So now we know for sure that you want to continue down the path of openness. Now we only need to feel confident whether all the powers at Microsoft are with you on that one … End update.

I’m disappointed that I have not received any response from any of the Microsoft people (Kim, Mike, Bill) on the Identity Gang mailing list with respect to the following issue that I raised earlier this week:

I think whether there’ll be one identity metasystem everybody participates in — equally? — or whether it is controlled/branded/perceived to be owned/wanted to be owned by one vendor remains a fairly confused subject.

Just received … an e-mail invitation to the upcoming "Digital Identity World/Financial Services Conference" that features the following talk:

11:15AM - 11:45AM
Implications of the Microsoft Identity Metasystem for Strong Authentication
Microsoft - Mike Jones (InfoCards)

Arising from unusually open conversations, and based on the laws of identity developed by Kim Cameron through these conversations, Microsoft will be releasing a cross-platform identity metasystem and InfoCard user interface with Windows Vista. This system takes a quite different approach to identity and authentication, allowing many new approaches to solving this problem at scale. Mike Jones will detail the identity metasystem, and highlight its implications for the problems faced by financial services.

So Microsoft will be releasing the identity metasystem with Windows Vista? And it will be the "Microsoft Identity Metasystem" per title of this talk?

Can somebody from Microsoft clarify whether this is indeed the way you position it, or whether this was just the work of an overzealous copy editor somewhere? If that’s how you present it, do we — i.e. everybody who is not releasing an identity metasystem with Windows Vista because we are not Microsoft — need a different name for what we are all striving for? The NetMesh Identity Metasystem and the SXIP Identity Metasystem, perhaps?

Or do we need the Identity Meta-meta-system?

Some members of this community may have adopted the Microsoft-originated term "identity metasystem" believing that "we all work together, on a merit-basis, to create interoperable identity-enabled services everywhere" (and they are excited about this, because it would be a Microsoft-first to ever engage the markets-are-conversations as openly as that), while others think it’s just all a "typical" Microsoft ploy that will end up in tears for those who thought otherwise.

Given some of the previous rhetoric, I’d love to believe the former, but phrases like the "Microsoft Identity Metasystem … [released] with Windows Vista" make me queasy. Now that no clarification seems to be forthcoming …? I guess everybody will think whatever they will think and the cynics will claim to have been right all along.

… writes Ryan Tate. That’s what I’d call an interesting thought.

Just discovered that the transcript of the PC Forum 2005 panel that I was on ("Presence in the Enterprise") is available on-line.

Done very nicely. Thanks, Esther, Rafe, Daphne and crew.