by Brian Kissel In Q1 of 2011 PayPal, the OpenID Foundation and Janrain will be facilitating the OpenID Retail Summit hosted by PayPal in Silicon Valley. We are also in discussions with the National Retail Foundation (NRF) about their possible participation. The meeting date is tentatively being scheduled around the NRF Innovate 2011 Conference in San Francisco March 8^th-10^th. Over the last few years, many industries and market segments have been embracing social sign-on and publishing solutions to increase customer engagement through online channels.  Open standard technologies including OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, Activity Streams, and OpenSocial are enabling organizations to better serve their customers and members while increasing the return on investment (ROI) of their online initiatives. One market segment which is demonstrating accelerated adoption are online retailers. For example, earlier this year Sears hosted an OpenID Summit at their headquarters in Chicago.  In order to serve this segment better, the OpenID Foundation has established a Retail Advisory Committee (RAC).  More information about the RAC can be found at

• Slideshare PowerPoint Overview
• OpenID Foundation Wiki
• Retail Advisory Committee Yahoo Group

Prior to the Q1 OpenID Retail Summit, there are two planning sessions where retailers can participate in the development of the agenda for the event.

• PayPal Innovate 2010 Conference – San Francisco, Oct 26^th-27th.  We will be having a planning session on Oct 26^th at this event.  Anyone can sign up and get a $100 discount for the event.
• Internet Identity Workshop – Mountain View, CA Nov 2^nd-4^th. There will be several sessions here on leveraging social sign-on and publishing, the underlying technologies (OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, Activity Streams, OpenSocial, etc.), benefits for retailers and their customers, and another opportunity to contribute to the agenda for the Retail Summit at PayPal.  There will be representatives attending from Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, AOL, MySpace, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Verisign, PayPal and many other identity and social networking providers.

We hope you will consider participating in either or both of the planning events and also attending the Retail Summit at PayPal in Q1 of next year.