OpenID Foundation Board Update – Expanded Representation

Published December 31, 2009
The voting results are in for the 2010 Board.  In addition to a strong group of returning members, we're glad to see four new members who will bring tremendous value and new perspectives.
  • Marc Frons, CTO of the New York Times
  • Daniel Jacobson, Director of Application Development at NPR
  • John Bradley, who has been focused on government adoption of OpenID
  • Dick Hardt, well known Open Identity innovator and entrepreneur
It is an exciting step in the Foundation’s evolution to have the voices of major website operators joining the conversation. Returning to previously held positions are Brian Kissel, CEO of JanRain; Allen Tom, Principal Software Architect at Yahoo!; and Joseph Smarr.
LexisNexis has also joined the board as a new sustaining corporate member and will be represented by Dermot O’Mahony, the Senior Director of Marketing Planning and Strategy at LexisNexis.
It’s shaping up to be a year full of tremendous potential. Some priorities for the coming year include:
  • Driving adoption and usage by website operators and end users through improvements in user experience, deployability, data management, and identity provider certification programs
  • Encouraging and supporting offerings by more identity providers including Facebook, Microsoft, PayPal, and AOL migration to OpenID 2.0
  • Expanding into new application areas including government and commerce with enhancements to OpenID including identity provider certification and the Contract Exchange extension.
  • Getting even broader representation on the OIDF board. As more corporate members join, we have the potential to add Robert Harles from Sears (commerce), Jonathan Coffman from PBS (broadcasting) and Bjorn Woltermann from Scout24/Deutsche Telecom (online media, international).