Dick Hardt dot org

At the last OpenID Foundation board meeting I gave the presentation below. I had hoped to have posted this sooner, but my dearth of video skills meant recording to video was significantly harder than creating the presentation — which was non-trivial itself. Unfortunately Joseph Smarr and I will not be on the OIDF board this year due to some confusion on when nominations ended. While I will miss being able to contribute to OpenID at the board level, I won’t miss the politics.

But back to the presentation. I have been trying to articulate my concerns with OpenID Connect, and this presentation captures my current thinking. OpenID Connect is not a user-centric architecture. It is a useful identity service, but it does not enable an identity network that could be a generative platform for new kinds of digital identity claims to be created and consumed. This is why user-centric identity is important — it enables us to create an identity platform instead of an identity service.

Is OpenID Connect the Future of Identity? Similar to Jonathan Zittrain’s book, “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It”;  do we need to redirect identity services towards an identity platform; or forego the digital identity innovation?