Digital Identity Advancement Foundation (DIAF) [Introductory]

Good morning, everybody. You've made it. It's the last day of EIC. I hope it's been a great conference for you. I hope I have a slide. This could get more interpretive if I don't have our slides. I'm Ian Glazer. That's Allan Foster. And among other things, there we are.

Well, there's 20 minutes in this presentation. You have no idea where this could go. A quick show of hands. Who among you have heard of the Digital Identity Advancement Foundation? Award winners, you should be.

Okay, good. Making sure. Yeah. It's good to see. We're an organization that is about a year and a half old, legally speaking. And we got created to, as Allan will expand on in a moment, our mission is to first acknowledge that there is a global lack of talent for digital identity practitioners. There's not enough of us in enough of places. We also have to acknowledge that it isn't necessarily easy to become an identity practitioner. A lot of the ways that one develops their skills, their network, and their knowledge is attending events like this. That comes with a fairly high price tag.

And especially in this kind of economy, it's not straightforward necessarily to get burgeoning practitioners to events like this. And so DIOF's primary mission is to help remove financial barriers from that participation, making sure that everyone has an opportunity to contribute, to connect, to learn in identity management, and make sure that we can actually address what I think is one of the more pernicious problems in our industry, which is that global lack of talent. So how do we invest in our future? DIOF is focused on these issues.

So today we're going to talk a little bit about what we've been doing, how we got here, a little bit of our origin story, what we've been doing in terms of programs currently, and where we want to go. And then lastly, just a little bit, if you're interested in getting involved, how you can do so. And with that, Mr.

Foster, to talk about our history. Okay, so we can talk a little bit about our history, and you can give me the next slide, because that actually gives our whole history in one slide. Read amongst yourselves. So in reality, we started the award back in 2022, and that was started in the OpenID Foundation. And the getting that set up, the first Kim Cameron Award came out in 2022, another one following year, and we're sponsoring both here at EIC and IDENIVERSE.

And the recognition within OIDF that running a foundation kind of operation is not really in sync with their own goals and missions of that organization. And it made a lot more sense to establish actually a formal foundation to take that on.

And so, mid-2024 or so, we established, was it 24? There's literally a timeline right there.

Yeah, but that's, it says ODF. We established the DIAF as an organization and started the long and painful process of interacting with the US federal government to get foundation status and all of those kinds of things working. And taking on essentially the responsibility of the foundation and trying to meet those goals that we're actually having a look at. Now I can go to 2024, when we established the Vittorio Bertucci Award as a second award within the program, specifically focused on trying to address specific needs.

And so in the Kim Cameron Award, we were focusing on enabling people who otherwise wouldn't be able to come to conferences such as this, and IDENIVERSE, and Authenticate, to be able to attend the conferences. In the Vittorio Award, our focus was a little bit different, and that is focusing on folks who wanted to get involved and were willing to contribute into the standards organizations. And enabling their involvement in that, sponsoring, and actually giving some mentorship to try and get the involvement inside of that. Which brings us to today. Look at you with the segue.

So as Alan mentioned, we have two primary vehicles for the way we actually achieve our mission. They're both awards. Essentially, we have our Kim Cameron Award and the Vittorio Bertucci Award. The Kim Award was created by the OpenID Foundation. And in fact, the first place that a Kim Cameron Award winner attended, because it was about sponsoring people to come to events, was in fact EIC. And Kim's long heritage with Martin and the rest of Copenhager Coal, which we are deeply thankful for. For those of you who didn't know Kim, he had a sort of impish way of wanting to cause trouble.

And someone who I would say is the definition of young at heart. And so really this award was meant to be able to help bring typically people newer in their careers into identity management and help grow that community. And we're certainly indebted to the OpenID Foundation for first creating the award and then giving us the responsibilities to carry it on. But it recognizes Kim's contribution to the community as a whole and the ability to bring people along on a journey that wasn't always obvious, let's say.

Now, we've just awarded this year's Kim Cameron Award winners. Some of whom, one of whom is here. We will talk about that in a second. We have five winners. They will be attending EIC. I think it's two people at Identiverse this year and two at Authenticate. I may have that number slightly wrong. People from around the world, practitioners, burgeoning practitioners from around the world. Hopefully you've seen Lena, who's here and been around this week. But if you're at some of these other events, look for the Kim Cameron Award winners. They'll be there, hopefully contributing as well.

And then we created the Vittorio Award. Vittorio had an oversized presence in terms of both the community writ large and the standards world. And his passion for technical standards was something that we wanted to honor. And so this is a little bit of a different award. This is given to practitioners who are potentially further along in their career, but want to contribute to technical standards and just can't find a way to do that. What you may not know, if you're not familiar with sort of standards bodies, is they have these amazing meetings from time to time in person.

Often, they are not in geographically convenient places. And it is hard sometimes to get your corporation, your employer, yourself to those events and to find funding for those events. But these are people that could really contribute because they have practical experience dealing with the implications of implementing standards. This is what it really means when you do this. So that kind of insight is incredibly powerful in standards organizations and in standards bodies. But that's a disconnect. They can't get people there.

That great knowledge doesn't get shared in the same way as it does in, say, a mailing list on a Zoom call. So really, the Vittorio Award is about trying to get people to these events. It's a bit of a different structure, but it's really making sure that those who want to contribute in standards, and let me be very clear, we need more people to contribute to our standards efforts. One of the complaints, which I think is a little maybe naive, is that, oh, it's always the same people at these events. It's always the same companies. But the opportunity is always there for all of us.

The challenge sometimes is finding the financial means to do so, the time means to do so. We help to reduce that burden through Vittorio's award. We will be opening up applications for the 2025 Vittorio Vitoci Award in the next few weeks, I think under four weeks. This is an award that has a little bit more open-endedness to it. So if you are thinking about wanting to get more involved in technical standards, but you have found challenges, especially financial ones, we'll see at the end a little call to action of how to get involved. Stay tuned because this award will be open quite soon.

So we actually have not only a 2025 award winner here, but we also have two previous winners for both the Kim Cameron Award and the Vittorio Award. You've seen Lena and Grace and Eric around this week. If you haven't, they're in the room. They're in panels very soon in the room. Say hi. These people represent the future for our industry. Not that we put all of our faith.

Eric, you've got to just don't screw it up. But it's more about giving the opportunity for more people to have exposure to what we do and to give back. And this is something that we are all at Daya very, very thankful for. Alan? So that brings us into where we're going, what we're trying to get to. And we see we're trying to start building on what we have. We have these awards.

Obviously, that requires money. And so one of the significant things that we have to talk about is how do we find money in order to enable for these awards, as well as how do we facilitate ongoing collaboration with the awardees.

This year, I'm actually really excited by the fact that, as Ian just pointed out, we have past attendees who are now coming to be presenters and coming to continue to share with the community and grow within the community. And that's one of the important things that we're trying to get to.

Obviously, the current programs strengthen those, both financially as well as programmatically, and facilitate ongoing with that. But also trying to identify new opportunities where we can facilitate the same kind of mission. Are there industries that we are overlooking? Do we have blind spots? I know we do, I just don't know what they are. But are there blind spots? Are there similar kinds of needs, either within the identity space or parallel to it in other places, that would also benefit from having that kind of mentorship, that kind of support to get people involved in them?

And that's sort of going to lead to our ask, right? You guys can see it just as much as we can, probably more so because you've got basically more eyes than there's blind spots.

So, we can't do this without our supporters. Like I mentioned, Copenger Coal and EIC has been really the spiritual home for the Kim Cameron Award. It started here. But organizations like Identiverse, the FIDO Alliance, the OpenID Foundation, all of these have been so important to the organization, and more importantly, to our award winners. And being able to offer these opportunities. I know in this room are individual contributors for whom we are deeply thankful for.

So, if you're wondering, how do I get involved? There's actually a lot of ways. If you have local events, national events, that maybe aren't an Identiverse or an EIC, but just as important, or if not more so, in your region, and you're willing to sponsor an attendee to come, it may just be as simple as, here's a free ticket, here's a complimentary ticket for an award winner, let us know. If you are at an organization that is looking to make contributions to these kinds of missions, feel free to reach out. And point to places where you think we could help. Where should we be bringing new talent?

Where should we be looking for new talent? And how do we engage with those organizations and those opportunities? And last but not least, Alan will happily swipe a credit card and take a donation immediately after this session. But who to talk to?

So, there's a third person missing here, Erin Crow. Many of you know, she's quiet today. Many of you know from her work at AWS, her work at the FIDO Alliance, but the three of us represent the organization with an incredible amount of help from Elizabeth Garber, who cannot, her efforts cannot be understated, especially today. But if you have ideas, if you have questions, if you have a notion how things could get better, how we can improve our reach and our impact, please feel free to reach out. The easiest way to do so is go to diaf.link. That'll give you, we have a, so, true story.

We went to buy diaf.org. We're an org, we're a nonprofit, let's go do this. .org domains are incredibly expensive, and when you're a nonprofit with no money, that seems like a very luxurious purchase, so we chose not to do that. DigitalIDadvancement.org or diaf.link, you can learn more about the missions, you can learn more about the awards, you can learn more about ways to engage and to contribute. And with that, thank you everybody for not just attending on a Friday morning at the end of a long, long conference, but your sponsorship in the little ways for both the programs and the awardees.

Thank you again. Yeah, thanks so much.

Actually, we have some time for some questions, if you have any. So, Mike Jones, personal testimonial, I wouldn't be in this space if Kim Cameron hadn't said to me one day in February 2005, let me tell you about digital identity and why it's a cool problem. You should come work on this with me. And I did. And I'm still here. One of the things that came out when Kim passed was just a couple of years ago, one of the things that came out when Kim passed was just how many people came forward and said, oh, well, Kim helped me get into the space in this way.

And so part of what I personally committed to is trying to do the same, to teach people the ropes of how you be effective in standards and how you form productive relationships. And talking about Kim's wicked wit, one of the things he said to me early on was great advice, always find something good to say about somebody. You will get much further by building allies than making enemies.

But then he said, now, you and I may know that their whole business premise is fundamentally flawed, that the market is going to destroy them, this competitor is going to wipe them out, and there's reasons that people will never use the system they're contemplating. But you can still find it in your heart to say to them, wow, you're working on a really important problem.

Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Mike. That is Kim in a beautiful little summation. And in fact, after my keynote where I told that story two years ago, a good friend came up to me and said, now I'm racking my brain to see if I can remember you ever saying to me, wow, you're working on a really important problem. Thank you. Anyone else wants to add something else?

All right, then thank you very much, guys. Thank you, everybody.