I`ve barely recovered from this year`s Directory Experts Conference. As always, the NetPro folks found a great location, fed us well, and kept everything running like a finely oiled machine. Even a Wookless event couldn’t kill the fun — Wook took his challenge from Stuart Kwan remotely and exceeded all expectations as usual. This time the challenge was to adapt the kermit-the-frog song “rainbow connection” to describe strong authentication… it was priceless.

This year, it wasn’t the partying that tuckered me out at DEC – it was the coding marathon! We had a last-minute sprint to finish up our information card adventure for the attendees at DEC, cooked up by a few of us for the purpose of getting people at the conference to use and understand the Identity Metasystem as a real thing and not merely as a lofty concept.

Our adventure was a website called HOT CHICKEN!. Hot Chicken! is a site where you can go to vote on the best picture of a DEC attendee with the DEC Chicken — in this case a 6’5″ rendition of said chicken. The attendee who gets the most votes for their picture will win a Microsoft Zune – but you have to use an information card to see the pictures and to vote. If you are wondering what on earth any of this has to do with a chicken, the answer is that the chicken has a long and venerable history at DEC, which I am nowhere near qualified to explain. You’ll have to check out Gil`s blog for that kind of insider information :)

The Hot Chicken! site is built with Joomla (the open source Content Management System) and has PamelaWare for Joomla installed, not quite a version of PamelaWare that I can release (I hard-coded most of the admin settings) — but it is pretty darn close. Using PamelaWare for Joomla (PW-jos for short), users can authenticate to Joomla via information cards.

Even MORE interesting is that you can authenticate to Hot Chicken with one of two Identity Providers:

• Kim Cameron’s “Human Present” Identity Provider (this is the code that Kim demoed at IIW last december)
• The Pamela Project Identity Provider (an instantiation of the Higgins STS, running on Ubuntu)

So please go and give Hot Chicken! a try! You’ll see there are still loose ends & holes (there are a few blog entries that will come from my chicken experience, that’s for sure), and we’re missing some critical validation bits & testing, but I’m still pretty sure that by enabling Joomla and opening up 2 new identity providers, we have taken a big step.

The Pamela Provider is up and running as a direct effort on the part of the Bandit team, and particularly of Daniel Sanders and Dale Olds, who managed to plow through all sorts of barriers and issues with dogged determination to get the provider running in time for Gil’s announcement on DEC day 2, as I worked on RP code (which was originally contributed by Pat Felsted, another Bandit, and then “pluginified” by me). The Bandit team as a whole has earned my eternal respect & gratitude, many thanks everyone (even Tom) :). I’m really looking forward to growing and maintaining the Pamela Provider for a long time to come, and to contributing back to Higgins in as many ways as I can.

Of course, all of these shenanigans were really a prelude to my talk on CardSpace — a summary of which I will save for another day.

So go vote!!! And tell me what you think…