A couple of weeks ago the BBC hosted twenty-six people from seventeen organizations including eight OpenID Providers and eight OpenID Relying Parties (sites which accept OpenID logins) in New York City to kick off an OpenID Content Provider Advisory Committee. The goal of the session was to answer specific questions by the Content Provider community (media companies and national affinity groups) as well as to provide feedback to the OpenID Foundation, its member companies, and the wider community on the future direction of OpenID. While OpenID has seen rapid adoption in the "user generated content" segment (blogs, discussion groups, wikis, etc.), we were very excited to see increased interest from mainstream media companies and affinity organizations. Participants at this event included AARP, AOL, BBC, Google, Hearst Magazines, JanRain, Meredith, MySpace, National 4-H, National Public Radio (NPR), The New York Times, Reed Business Information, Six Apart, Time Inc., Vidoop, and Yahoo!. Throughout the day we covered a wide range of topics including:

• Business case for OpenID — use cases and economic impact
• Best practices for OpenID Providers and Relying Parties in the areas of user experience, data support, security, and product features
• Optimal Content Provider user experience
• Data Management — sources, integration, industry specific data, accuracy, security & trust
• Coming Enhancements — Provider Authentication Policy Extension (PAPE), OAuth, Portable Contacts API, MySpace Data Availability, and integration of OpenID into browsers.

Yahoo!, Google, and MySpace all presented information about their OpenID Provider services, thoughts on user experience and lessons learned, and some future plans. National 4-H presented a summary of an OpenID-based integrated National, State, and Local web platform that they will be deploying in the coming months. We shared a case study on Japan Airlines (JAL) federated partner commerce using OpenID with the proposed Trusted Data Exchange (TX) extension that Nomura Research Institute (NRI) has been developing. There was extensive discussion between existing and potential Relying Parties and the OpenID Providers about what would facilitate faster and broader adoption of OpenID in the Content Provider community. The session was moderated and feedback captured by Market Focus, a strategic marketing consulting firm who will be performing additional customer and market research on behalf of the OpenID Foundation. If other content providers would like to join this advisory committee, please contact Johannes Ernst or Brian Kissel of the OpenID Foundation Customer Research Committee for further information. Additionally, many members of the OpenID community will be attending the upcoming Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) on November 10-12 at the Computer History Museum in Mt. View, CA. This will provide a great venue for face to face discussions and additional opportunities to provide input and feedback on the future direction of OpenID.