Those of you who weren’t able to get to the Identity Open Space Meeting in Santa Clara, California on Monday, you missed out! There were only 5 time slots for talks, which resulted in some tough decisions where two interesting talks happened at the same time…

There were two CardSpace-related talks, one of which I hosted and one of which I took notes for. The notes from the two sessions are now on the IOS wiki here and here.

The first talk was entitled ‘Easy Questions about CardSpace‘, and was hosted by Bill Barnes. It was a full-contact kind of talk, with many other members of the CardSpace team present and pitching in to help people get an idea of the technology. I tried to paraphrase as many of the questions as possible for the wiki, if any of you were present, it would be nice to have my perceptions of the questions & answers sanity checked, just in case I am misreprenting anything.

The second talk was entitled ‘Hard Questions about CardSpace‘ – thanks very much to Bob Blakley, who somehow managed to take lightning fast notes while being a very active participant as well! We had a number of members of the CardSpace team up front, and they fielded a varied and lively set of inquiries. I think some interesting topics were surfaced that were of benefit both to the participants and to the CardSpace team too. I encourage you to check out the notes.

I also attended other great sessions – one on OSIS and also a primer detailing what OpenID, i-names, and Higgins do. The quality of the content was extremely high.

The Digital ID World conference is underway as we speak. The highlight for me so far has been the vendor floor – it is truly amazing to see what new things are coming down the pipe. Most of the demos I’ve seen have a triple authentication login page – ie, you can choose whether to use username/password, information cards, or OpenID. That seems very civilized to me, and I think that this unified acceptance of multiple authentication methods gives customers a very cozy sense of stability.

I’m eagerly awaiting a talk later today entitled “Understanding infocards in an Enterprise Setting“, with Kim Cameron and Ping’s Patrick Harding. I’ll let you know what happens…