Tomorrow the 20th of June at 7pm we are opening the global registry for i-names. This was announced a few weeks ago by the XDI.org board. There will be 7 initial ibrokers 6 of whom are opening there doors tomorrow. There is a great site explaining i-names broadly for people and organizations along with a developer site. Cordance (Drummond Reed's company) has a new website up too articulating its pioneering role in brining user centric, privacy protecting digital addresses to the market

This day is a big day for many folks who have been working on this for various lengths of time (any where from 14 years to several months). I began working in the identity space first with the very early alpha experiment that Planetwork did for its 2004 conference. While preparing for that conference (which I worked to evangelize for) I had my first "identity woman" experience about 10 guys gathered to figure out how to kluge several systems together this identity stuff together and all day I listened - learning a lot and said one thing all day. At the end of the day we took a picture and I was the only woman there.

At the conference I was hired by Owen and the Identity Commons (1.0)along with Jan Hauser to work on driving adoption of these new tools in civil society. I was thinking today while talking to Bill Washburn saying that I didn't think we would be meeting today at Harvard on all these topics if it had not been for Owen's significant visionary personal investment in the vision of this new identity layer - that really empowered people. The specifics of that early program never came to fruition in exactly the way originally envisioned but the results have been demonstrable in many ways. So tomorrow if you get a chance be sure to say THANK YOU! Owen.
Yesterday, Monday the 19th was a big day with this proposal put forward to the Apache Foundation to become a project there.

The project would start with Yadis for URL/XRI-based service discovery, OpenID for web based single-sign-on and the basis of exchanging profile data, and to create a desktop component with a standard look and feel, ideally working with the Open Source Identity Selector (OSIS) project.

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