Late last month the MIT Media Lab hosted a party for the launch of the Global iNames Registry. The system is one of several aiming to create a long-term way of identifying individuals and organizations across different contexts.

Curious about what it all meant, I knew of no one better to ask than Identity Woman, Kaliya Hamlin. She told me that the identity standards landscape is forming quickly, with the participation of organizations large and small, and that it's important for nonprofits to engage in the process now instead of struggling to change policies and technologies later.

The Basics 

"User-Centric Digital Identity," Kaliya says, "is all about giving the user choice in how they present themselves to participate in community." She told me that the average internet user has log-ins with 8.6 different accounts, with many early adopters of new technologies having far more than that. One of the clearest advantages to an Open ID standard is a single log-in that works across all participating sites. Right now there are very few sites participating in such a standard, but Kaliya told me that was changing quickly.

"These tools are not about people merging into 'one' identity for themselves," she said. An Identity Broker, a type of vendor that serves these new Open ID standards, can help manage different profiles for different contexts. If you are signed in to an environmental website, you might want to use a different user profile than you would for a work or family website. You might want to share different contact information or personal history with different groups you interact with. Different profiles or personas would highlight different information about you depending on the context but would all be managed through one identifier and account.

These identifiers can be managed online and a new registry has opened to issue them, much like domain names are issued on the internet. Called i-names, identifiers like =Marshall are for individuals and like @NetSquared for organizations. "I-names offer a bunch of i-services," according to Kaliya. "Early on they are limited to Forwarding (from your i-name to other contact info) but the range of offerings will grow as the ecology matures."

The social web, Web 2.0 or whatever you want to call it, is supposed to be all about web services, interactivity and data portability. In this context, Open ID standards will be increasingly important.

Reality: this is big

Be that as it might, I've always found discussions about identity confusing. In part because it seems like there are so many different organizations working on it, most of whom I've never heard of before. I've had the impression that this issue is one that only starry-eyed geek idealists are engaging with and thus can be taken only so seriously.

Kaliya told me I was wrong about all of that. There are a number of different parties participating in the discussion, but that's typical of the formative stages of any technology standard she said. In fact, some of the heaviest hitters in the tech industry are working on Identity right now, Kaliya said. Microsoft, Oracle and SUN are all participating. NueStar, the organization that runs the registry for North American phone numbers also runs the registry for i-names. That's got me convinced that it's legitimate. A look at the organizations participating in the Identity Gang (from MIT to Best Buy!) put any doubts I had to rest.

I thought that big vendors considered it in their best interests to lock us in to their systems with non-open Identities. Kaliya says that's no longer the case. "They are all getting that identity is a 'commons' that no one can own," she says. "They are seeing the end of usefulness in approaching the world through silos. The whole corporate tech world is a big exercise in sticking things together...standards really make this less expensive."

So if this is full speed ahead, how can nonprofits get involved? Kaliya told me that there is a bounty program in the works for setting up OpenID implementations in Drupal and Plone - two popular content management systems in the nonprofit world. From keeping in touch with contacts as they move through their lives and change contact info to making our software more interoperable - there are countless reasons to support a future where OpenID is widespread.

Kaliya's own blog IdentityWoman.net is one place to engage in the conversation, as is the Identity Gang. If getting into conversations about software development is a sound strategy for nonprofits, it makes sense to me that getting in early on conversations about the standards underlying that software would be an even smarter move.