I spent the weekend in DC at TransparencyCamp, an event modeled after BarCamp focused on government transparency and open access to sources of federal data (largely through APIs and web services). Down the street, a social-media savvy conference called PowerShift convened over 12,000 of the nation&#...

In September of 2006, I wrote a piece called The Future of White Boy Clubs taking to task Ryan Carson for putting together a speaker lineup for his Future of Web Apps conference made up entirely of white men (for the record, Tantek resents being lumped in as “white”; he’s says he’s T...

I’ve been wanting to write about Ma.gnolia’s catastrophic data loss last week ever since it happened, but wasn’t quite sure how I wanted to approach it. Larry (Ma.gnolia founder and the sole person who maintained the site) is a good friend of mine, and Ma.gnolia was one of Citizen ...

A couple related posts caught my attention recently about OpenID. As I’m now a board member of the OpenID Foundation, I feel some responsibility for helping to inform folks about OpenID: what it is, how it’s used, why I believe that it has so much potential — and at same time, address ...

I’ve written about the password anti-pattern before, and have, with regards to Twitter, advocated for the adoption of some form of delegated authentication solution for some while. It’s not as if Twitter or lead developer Alex Payne aren’t aware of the need for such a solution (in ...

Chris Dracket responded to one of my tweets the other day, saying that “OpenID should be dead… it’s way over-rated”. I’ve of course heard plenty of criticisms of OpenID, but hadn’t really heard that it was “overrated” (which implies that people have a ...

The DiSo Project is just over a year old. It’s remained a somewhat amorphous blob of related ideas, concepts and aspirations in my brain, but has resulted in some notable progress, even if such progress appears dubious on the surface. For example, OAuth is a core aspect of DiSo because it enab...

The OpenID Foundation board election opened up on December 10. After a grueling nominations process (not really), we were left with 17 candidates vying for seven community board member seats. Your candidates are (alphabetized by first name): Allen Tom Brian Kissel Chris Messina ← that’s m...

A bi-weekly collection of linky goodness. Fluidity/Discover.io “Fluidity enhances the effectiveness of the social networks you are already on, helping you cut through the noise and identify both new people and old acquaintances to connect with. Today, you would need to explicitly search and me...

This is the statement that I submitted to answer the call, nominating myself as a candidate for community representative to the OpenID Foundation board: I have long been involved with the OpenID community and have advocated for its adoption ever since I discovered it. It is a central building block ...