Bringing Open Identity to Government – A Good Step Forward
Posted by Courion Corporation on Fri, Sep 18, 2009
Last week, the Gov 2.0 Summit opened in Washington, D.C., where policy makers and industry leaders discussed how technology can make government more functional. In conjunction with the summit, 10 companies announced that they will act as digital identity providers by supporting OpenID and Information Card technologies (described in depth here) for government Web sites, in an effort to make government Web sites easier to interact with. According to InformationWeek, the pilot programs aim to make use of Web 2.0 technologies to make government Web sites more open and participatory.
OpenID and Information Card technologies are a key part of the White House's Open Government initiative, which aims to provide strong privacy protections for users in order to speed efficiency. The purpose of these pilot programs is to give visitors to government Web sites pseudonymous interaction options that don't require users to reveal personal information. This makes access quicker, and requires less authentication from the user.
We applaud this effort and look forward to the next step in the process of delivering a holistic approach to access assurance as pointed out in my recent post. The move to trusted frameworks like OpenID is an important step to foster more participation and more efficiencies within our government agencies, and given the desire by the government to make more personal information available more broadly, it is critical to ensure that Web-based data is thoroughly protected.