Building on the momentum from last year, the OpenID Foundation is pleased to announce the addition of PayPal as a sustaining corporate member of the Board. PayPal selected Andrew Nash, Sr. Director of Information Risk Management and a longstanding advocate for OpenID, as their representative and joins the current board of seven community elected board members and five sustaining corporate members: Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo!. According to Andrew, PayPal decided to become a sustaining member of the Foundation for a few key reasons:

• Open standards-based user-centric identity is clearly becoming an increasingly important part of the evolving web infrastructure
• PayPal has significant experience and expertise with security, trust, reputation and retail transactions that can be directly relevant as OpenID expands into new market and application areas

Executive committee announced

Following the community board member elections in December, the Board elected its Executive Committee (EC) at the first OpenID Foundation Board meeting of 2009 (minutes). The EC which works with the executive director on day to day operations and governance of the Foundation. The following members were selected to the EC for 2009:

• Chair – Brian Kissel (JanRain)
• Vice-Chair – Scott Kveton (Vidoop) who was previously Chair
• Secretary – Mike Jones (Microsoft)
• Treasurer – Raj Mata (Yahoo!)
• Committee Liaison – David Recordon (Six Apart) who was previously Vice-Chair

The election of the EC was by unanimous consent on a full slate of officers, as discussed and determined by all the board members. The full Board meets every six weeks and the EC meets every two. In addition, in affirmation of the global nature of OpenID, the Board recently voted to add an International Liaison to the EC and will select that member shortly.

Board members featured on ReadWriteTalk

Last week, four Board members joined Sean Ammirati and others from popular technology blog ReadWriteWeb for an hour long podcast about increasing overall OpenID adoption, future plans for the OpenID Foundation and our thoughts on Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect. The interview has been published on ReadWriteTalk. Once again, we look forward to continuing our progress in 2009 and continue to welcome the input and contributions of the entire community.