innovative technology services
OpenID - online identity for the social network generation of learners and researchers
Andy Powell
Background
Andy is Head of Development at the Eduserv Foundation where he is responsible for specifying and delivering the Foundation's programme of internal research and standards-making activities and helping to oversee external grants. His primary areas of interest include: metadata, repositories and resource discovery; access and identity management; service architectures and Web 2.0; elearning, eportfolios and the use of 3-D virtual worlds such as Second Life in education.
Andy was the principle technical architect of the JISC Information Environment. He has been active in the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative for a number of years. He is a member of the DC Advisory Board and was previously a member of the DC Usage Board and chair of the DC Architecture Working Group. Andy jointly authored the DCMI Abstract Model and several other Dublin Core technical specifications. More recently he jointly authored the DC Eprints Application Profile for the JISC. He was also a member of the Open Archives Initiative Technical Committee.
Andy was previously an Assistant Director at UKOLN, University of Bath and before that he worked for the University of Bath Computing Services (BUCS).
David Recordon
Title of Presentation
OpenID Today
Background
David Recordon is Open Platforms Tech Lead for Six Apart, the largest independent blogging company in the world. Recordon has played a pivotal role in the development and popularization of key social media technologies such as OpenID. In 2005, Recordon collaborated with Brad Fitzpatrick in the original development of OpenID, which has since become the most popular decentralized single-sign-on protocol in the history of the Web. During a year and a half at VeriSign, Recordon played an active role in refining and evangelizing OpenID, bringing it from an experimental technology to one that's been endorsed by major companies ranging from AOL to Microsoft, and implemented for over 120 million identities on the Web. Recordon's history with open source software and open standards stretches back to the beginning of his career, when as a sophomore in high school he volunteered his time to lead an open source message board project with over forty members worldwide. This interest led to his co-founding of a message board hosting provider that still services tens of thousands of users around the world, and that he has since sold. Recordon was recently recognized by Google and O'Reilly as the recipient of a 2007 Open Source Award for his efforts with OpenID and is the youngest recipient in the history of the award. For more information, please see www.davidrecordon.com
Gavin Bell
Title of Presentation
How the Identity of Research is Changing
Synopsis
The nature of research is changing and the tools for research are shifting online. Increasingly scientists are using the web as the first port of call for information. Managing these multiple relationships can be time-consuming. OpenID addresses one part of this problem. It is an appealing technology solving a small enough problem to be of widespread use. The question posed to companies and institutions in the educational space is one of adoption against a background of increasing use on the wider internet. OpenID makes it clearer that there is one internet which everyone uses. The ability to migrate from one OpenID provider to another is an issue that needs some thought, especially for the educational sector. How will OpenID change applications aimed at the research community and how will its uptake change the nature of the community.
Background
Gavin has worked in web product development since the mid-90s, large scale web applications covering identity management, on-demand media and social software have been the main focus of his work. He currently designs social software for the Nature Publishing Group and has previously worked for the BBC, in advertising, publishing and academia. He writes on nascent for Nature and on take one onion. His personal website is gavinbell.com. Gavin lives in London with his wife and son, plus their two cats. He enjoys photography, web conferences, climbing mountains and cooking.
Nicole Harris
Title of Presentation
OpenID and User-Centric Identity: It's All About Me.
Synopsis
The introduction of OpenID brings about another step-change in the move towards decentralised identity and access management, and a move towards placing the user in more control of their online identity. In her presentation, Nicole will explore the question of why user-centric identity management has suddenly become important, how it sits alongside organisation-centric identity management and what impact it may have on the way that educational institutions provision infrastructure and support their users.
Background
As Senior Services Transition Manager at JISC, Nicole is responsible for the implementation and roll-out of federated access management within the UK educational community, and for the co-ordination of work relating to access and identity management across JISC. Nicole has worked for JISC for five years, and has managed a series of programmes of work in the fields of e-research, e-infrastructure, eLearning and open source developments.
Sean Mehan
Title of Presentation
Extending Institutional Identity into External Services and Communities
Synopsis
OpenID is an Authentication protocol which is enjoying widespread adoption amongst Web 2.0 services and projects. Many institutionally minded architects and developers have issues with it as regards its suitability for enterprise Authentication and have been slow to adopt it as a protocol, with technical trust being the biggest concern. UHI has been pursuing the idea of augmenting its own identity framework with the OpenID protocol for Authentication and integration with these diverse external services and thus extending the institutional footprint into the externally hosted and populist Web 2.0 sphere. This raises questions concerning a philosophical approach to emerging Authentication protocols and augmentation of the institutional service to make it more agile to externally developed services. It also raises questions about institutional representation in external services that are populist, a sustainable phenomena in the modern Internet. Finally, there is the question of how this will affect the active net citizen's choices as they move from a student experience into professional life and want to retain an established Internet identity
Background
Sean Mehan is the chief architect of the component framework of the UHI technical infrastructure that supports the full educational spectrum of services and activities for a distributed, federated campus. He has been involved in the design and development of the UHI technical harness since 1994. He has been interested in Authentication/Authorisation and institutional enterprise requirements for more than a decade and has been heavily involved with Eduserv developments of Shibboleth support with the GuanXi project which supports a distributed WS based Shibboleth 1.3 compliant Authentication/Authorisation engine and guards for institutional use.
Scott Wilson
Title of Presentation
OpenID and eLearningSynopsis
There are many identity schemes in place in the education system serving different purposes. In this presentation Scott Wilson explores where OpenID may fit into, or disrupt, the wider picture of systems and processes in eLearning, including areas such as assessment, self-organisation, and coordination.
Background
Scott Wilson is a senior researcher at the Institute of Educational Cybernetics in the University of Bolton, and an assistant director of the JISC-CETIS service supporting JISC's technology and standards development activities. Scott has also worked as part of the Australian Shibboleth federation project team, MAMS, based at Macquarie University, Sydney.