Bob Blakley works for the Burton Group and has been involved in identity for some time. Writing about the recently launched Open Identity initiative with the US Government, he cited a reason why the announcement is big news, with which I strongly agree (from an American perspective, YMMV in other countries):
The second reason today’s announcement [...]
Cross-posted to the OpenID blog.
Today in collaboration with Vivek Kundra, the nation’s first CIO, we are announcing a pilot program intended to enable individual citizens to login to government websites with their existing accounts — without revealing their password or personally identifying information — using OpenID and InfoCard technologies.
This is an important step in the [...]
As the US government considers OpenID as a vehicle for citizen engagement, it became time for the OpenID Foundation’s website to receive similar consideration. For some time, the site has been neglected and ignored — serving primarily as a resource for developers, with little regard paid to people just learning about digital identity. The new [...]