…or so it seems.

The Kantara Initiative launched yesterday. It describes its goals as:

Bridging and harmonizing the identity community with actions that will help ensure secure, identity-based, online interactions while preventing misuse of personal information so that networks will become privacy protecting and more natively trustworthy environments.

Sounds like Identity Commons? Or the Liberty Alliance?

Well, as Phil Hunt explains:

The Liberty Alliance Project is migrating to a new organization known as the Kantara Initiative.

That would explain the latter relationship. (Minus: why is there a need to migrate from one organization to another?).

More importantly: what about Identity Commons, which is alive and well and has served exactly that umbrella role successfully for some years? For evidence of its success as umbrella, look no further than the list of projects chartered there: virtually everybody is there, so it must be working.

I was involved in the strategic review process that the Liberty Alliance conducted last summer to determine its future. Kantara as announced yesterday sounds exactly what this process looked like it was going to produce. One key part of my input back then was: "whether any new organization will fly you can only determine by seeing who is willing to publicly join and endorse it with which projects. There are some must-have participants; if you don’t get those, it won’t fly." I still believe that was sound advice.

Well, I’m looking for the list of announced supporters, and all I find are five testimonials, at least three of which are from long-term Liberty members. No OpenID Foundation, no OSIS, no Identity Commons, no Project VRM, no OASIS, IETF, W3C and so forth. Very few vendors, too. In my mind, that is pretty far from the threshold needed for success of any kind for any new kind of identity organization.

Coverage by GCN states "A call for founding members was released today, so that all interested parties can get into the organization on the ground floor". That’d be all fine and good, albeit unorthodox, if Kantara had been conceived and put together over the weekend, instead of over the past 12 months or so with countless, countless discussions with all sorts of potential members and supporters. So I’m really baffled by the expectations that the initiators for Kantara have and what they hope they can manage to accomplish.

I do like the name, though ;-)

By the way, what about instead of shuffling some of the deck chairs to create Yet Another Identity Umbrella Organization (YAIUO), let’s figure out how identity could ever have a business model? Seems to me that would be much more useful.