With much fanfare, I’d like to announce the availability of my analysis of the last OSIS Interop.  Hosted on the Nulli Secundus website, the paper is possible due to sponsorship contract from Microsoft that allowed me to also create a lot of the infrastructure supporting the I3 Interop.  With luck, that infrastructure will serve as the basis for many more Interops to come!

This paper is not about who “won” the Interop;  in fact, no solutions or participants are explicitly named at all.  Instead, the focus was on participation, cumulative results analysis per solution role, achievements as a community, and next steps.

I believe that the I3 Interop has set us up to build a very robust, very comprehensive common feature landscape for Information Cards. The I3 Interop was not nearly as impactful for OpenID, however due to the incredible efforts of John Bradley, I believe that I4 will see some very interesting developments and participation on the OpenID side of the house.

I continue to be in awe of the dedication and spirit of collaboration that our community has demonstrated over the last two years.  It is clear that everyone is interested in getting it right, first and foremost; enough for Interop testers to enter more than 1200 separate test results into our wiki over a five-month period.

You’ll have to read the report to learn what else went on :-)   If you were a participant in the Interop and you have additional wisdom to offer or you completely disagree with my interpretation, I am very open to putting out a revised version of this document incorporating additional perspectives!

Big thanks to Dale, Axel, and Mike for adding their thoughts, and MASSIVE MONUMENTAL thanks to Trish Jones (who goes by Patricia L. Jones professionally), who went far far above and beyond the call of duty to act as editor through revision after revision.  I used to think I had a fairly good grasp of the English language;  I now know that I have a long way to go to attain technical writing zen.  Without Trish, you would be reading a very different paper.

Well?  What’re you hanging around here for?  Go read the paper!!!

As part of the next OSIS Interop, participants are contributing pain points that stand in the way of easy interoperation of user-centric components.

My personal list involves the pieces that I have found to stand in the way, when writing code for the Pamela Project. For those of you who are interested, the discussion is still going on, you could probably sneak in a few extra suggestions if you were do it soon. I would suggest subscribing to both the OSIS general mailing list and the new Google Group dedicated to this particular Interop (the new list is currently empty, but I don’t expect it to remain that way for long).

List items have so far ranged from usability issues to protocol underspecification, to debates over whether certain aspects of a component can be implemented securely. There are OpenID suggestions from at least two different participants, which is great! I think the final list is going to be an important body of work, and I personally would like to see that body of work turned into the beginnings of a set of recommended practices that new component writers can refer to as they work to become interoperable.

Stay tuned for more…