The first three architectures in your summary relate to Federating directories using information stored about people in various (trusted) directories - generally to determine if people should be granted access to privileged information / resources. Think username/password. All about adding value to existing commercial/institutional infrastructure - ROI for organisations.

The fourth ‘OpenID’ is an implementation of what some group into the ‘IDENTITY2.0′ category. Accepting or providing information people assert about themselves online, generally to establish who they are and to provide convenient ways to filter access to relatively open information / resources. Think URL and 100 point ‘credit check’.

I’m hoping the projects education.au are involved with will continue to push forward implementations of BOTH types of Identity management. Facilitating federation of organisational /institutional directories in which I have user accounts will reduce the frustration levels when I need to access those trade-secrets safely locked away in internal networks. As the world moves toward more open web based content and connections, logging into my blog first thing each morning should be sufficient for most of the sites I care about to know that I am indeed the fang and really only care about stuff my social networks are talking about.

Fang - Mike Seyfang

I remember during the design of me.edu the debates about the point (or otherwise) of duplicating facilities that are available for free from a number of sites. But it seems that me.edu has indeed hit a sweet spot for those in the transition.

Well done and all the best for this service for Aussie educators.

Fang - Mike Seyfang

Hope yu don’t mind me leaving this note here.
I just flicked you ‘trusted services’doc http://www.educationau.edu.au/jahia/webdav/site/myjahiasite/shared/papers/trusted-servicesGH.pdf
to prof fels at http://www.accesscard.gov.au/

I’m sure he’ll get a buzz out of comparing ‘clouds’. Mentioned he might set up an open forum to help the silos compare their own little clouds, with the idea of finding out what they have in common. We can only hope. You’ll know hard it is to help disengaged learners move outside their comfortable little domains.

Tell me, do your clouds have even one initiative that considers the communication between silos, or is everything in edu land based oround repositories”?

If it’s a public one (and we limit our ideas to a national domain, because that’s the way things normally get funded) our ideas will revolve around using our public library cards as a proof of identification to (online) national resources; in the first instance as a way to keep the spam out of a citizens learning account. Over time, as TRUST BUILDS between remote communities, the degrees of authentication to ‘deeper’ inter- institutional repositories and resources could be added.

If we measure an institution by the number of its global domains (it’s VO’s) that are accessed by citizens, then its likely we might start to see (the aggregation of) more relevant institutions. We won’t see notice the passing of irrelevant institutions ones because, for the most part, they’re already so private, so comples, and considered so untrustworthy, they’re irrelevant.

For how many more years are we to hear that MAMS (and its peers) is “building a testbed federation between institutions”? It seems quite logical I know. But you have to believe that (educational) institutions never change, and there’s 2400 years of evidence, in the western world, to the contrary.