After months of anticipation, speculation and heated discussion in the identity community the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC)  will be released this coming Friday, April 15th, beginning at 11:30 AM EDT at an event at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. in Washington D.C. The strategy was first revealed in a draft document published in June of 2010 under the auspices of Howard Schmidt who is Cyber-Security Coordinator in the White House Executive Office of the President.  Expected distinguished speakers will include: Gary Locke, Secretary of Commerce and  Howard A. Schmidt.

You can watch live video of the announcement by clicking: release-white-houses-national-strategy-trusted-identities-cyberspace-nstic

Several representatives from Identity Commons including: Kaliya Hamlin, Mary Ruddy, and Jay Unger will be attending the announcement event.

For additional information on NSTIC visit the NIST website at: http://www.nist.gov/nstic.  See also http://www.nstic.us which is public coalition of organizations, including Identity Commons, that are attempting to foster an open, public dialog on NSTIC.

Jeremy Grant, who is the newly appointed Senior Executive Advisor and leader of the recently formed U.S. Dept. of Commerce National Program Office for the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC), made a brief appearance and presentation at the annual IDtrust Symposium, on April 6th, at NIST in Gaithersburg MD.  Grant gave a 30-minute overview presentation about NSTIC (http://middleware.internet2.edu/idtrust/2011/slides/03-national-strategy-trusted-identities-cyberspace-nstic-grant.pptx) and answered audience questions about the strategy which was first published back in late June of 2010.  In his talk he emphasized that the further development of NSTIC would be a "private sector led; multi-stakeholder collaboration" and that the leaders of the strategy group consider privacy and user choice to be central goals.  He also announced that the release of the final draft of the strategy document, signed by President Obama  would be next Friday, April 15th at an event scheduled to be held at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. 

Identity Commons is a community of groups working on developing the identity and social layer of the web. We are loosely connected sharing a common purpose and principles. Our main community gathering is the Internet Identity Workshop that happens twice a year.

We create opportunities for both innovators and competitors, for both the big guy and the small fry to come together in a safe and balanced space.

Our organizational forms are diverse including:

• several dozen people on a mailing list
• nonprofit foundations behind particular technologies
• open source projects part of other foundations
• autonomous projects working on market advocacy and development

We formed to facilitate information sharing and coherence this space and to support interoperability and convergence around open standards.